Colour in Sevilla

Seville is an interesting city. It's a place rich in colour, so I shot colour, although found myself aching for black and white which is how I normally choose to explore portraits. Curious, that it felt this way.

There's a very obvious aesthetic in places like this, by which you allow yourself to be seduced with large blocks of colour and just let your mouth water while the sun shines. Is this really so wrong? I know plenty of photographers who would say so, the sort who are quite good at explaining the difference between beauty and glamour. What instead do I look for?

Amidst a confusion about what I am looking at, or being seduced by, and however bright-looking a city is, it is still only a city because of its people. Surprisingly, Seville stopped shouting at me when I paid attention to the people I was with. And as I started to notice them more, I saw their relationship to the space around them and–quietly–to each other. It's an interesting relationship, and makes me wonder about how much a person reflects a city. Or is it the other way around?

•••

[extract from diary, april 21]

What am I remembering?

Many walls painted yellow, or orange, or rust-red, all standing out next to white plaster and wrought iron. Purple scarf, blue shoes; red napkin boxes, blue writing on white sachets of sugar, and light gleaming off hot, metal surfaces; oranges in the trees and on the ground; lavender and lichen that make the storm clouds appear almost silver - pewter at the very least;...


I wonder how I might represent any of its colour using black and white - so this becomes about the people and their relationships and the details of how things are arranged together.

•••

How would all this look in black and white?




{Today's soundtrack: Band of Horses - Cease To Begin}