I’ve set myself the daily prompt of choosing a photograph and making some notes here - nothing too formulated. A way to keep looking and thinking about why I’m drawn to certain images. What do they mean to me? What’s the wider context? What can I learn about them from reputable sources? A mix of my own thoughts and findings, and a learning process. I’ve been thinking about a statement from John Berger’s Understanding a Photograph (2013) lately within the context of our relationship to photographs now that most of us have constant access to a camera on our phone:
“Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation. A photograph is a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen. If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless”
Now that everything is consistently photographed, does that mean all photographs are meaningless? Something to think about. Every photograph doesn’t mean something to everyone.
Today I’m looking at a photograph I saw a few months ago at Helen Levitt: In The Street at The Photographers’ Gallery.
Helen Levitt, New York 1980
What stood out to me at first was that it was in colour. Maybe because I’d been looking at lots of black and white imagery around that time so it felt refreshing and unexpected - I also wasn’t aware of her colour work. The vibrant green and the blue of the cars gave me a sense of warmth. It’s a Dye Transfer Print which is a handmade photographic printing process used widely between the 1920s and the 1950s. MoMa notes that in these prints, three layers of dye—cyan, magenta, and yellow—are applied sequentially, by hand, to one emulsion layer. The process involves many steps and painstaking alignment of each dye layer, and as a result, dye transfers are rare and were seldom made by amateurs. They are very stable, and, when executed correctly, they allow the photographer exceptional control over the final colour balance. This explains why the colours look so good.
The central character is the little girl playing between the green car and the kerb - it looks like she might be looking for something she dropped? The shiny silver wheel hub and car bumper are gleaming nuances in contrast to the raw grittiness and litter-strewn New York street.