Cartier-Bresson at Somerset House

On Friday I eventually got round to going to Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour at Somerset House.  The exhibition opened in November and I managed to catch it before it closed on 27 January.

Cartier-Bresson's work was primarily in black and white which allowed him to photograph in a more artistic way.  Colour it was believed was restricted for business.  Improvements in colour reproduction however led to an increased in demand for colour photography in the post-war period.

Cartier-Bresson was sceptical about the artistic potential for colour photography and he had misgivings about colour as an expressive form.  Despite this he acquiesced that colour was in its infancy and had room to grow and become something perhaps greater.

This exhibition looks at a number of photographers whose devotion to expression in colour measures up to Cartier-Bresson's requirement that content and form are in perfect balance.  These include his contemporaries like Ernt Haas and Fred Herzog.  Few however could live up to his demands to for 'the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression'.

I thought this exhibition would give me some more insight into the use of colour over black and white photography as this is something that I struggle with at times.  It did but I felt that it fell short somehow perhaps because of the number of photographers included in the exhibition.  I think the layout of the exhibition was a little busy and as some images were displayed in corridors.  The rooms were small and pokey and with more than a handful of people present it became difficult to move around.

I choose not to work exclusively in one medium of the other but admit that I may have had a leaning towards black and white when I first started out.  However after learning more about colour and its effects on an image I feel that I might be leaning more towards it as a preferred option.  I feel that colour can give a different kind of emotion to a picture.  We can be overwhelmed before even looking too deeply at an image solely by the photographer's use of colour.

When I shoot I tend to shoot with colour in mind.  This is probably as a result of shooting digitally.  However, I occasionally set out to shoot in black and white and makes me view my subject differently.  I think having always worked in colour opting to convert to black and white places modern photographers at a disadvantage when it comes to black and white images.  We don't tend to instinctively know the graphical elements that make a good subject for a black and white rendering.

The exhibition included some of the usual suspects like Joel Meyerowitz and Trent Parke.  Some of the photographers that particularly appealed to me in this exhibition whose work I hadn't see before was Andy Freeberg, Karl Baden and Boris Savelev.  I will write about them separately on my blog.

Overall the exhibition provided a link for me with Cartier-Bresson and colour which is something I didn't have before.  It has given me some food for thought about the uses of colour over black and white and it has introduced me to some interesting photographers who have worked in unusual projects.