Oxford Circus - Photography

Revisiting Oxford Circus

The centre of the known Universe, the X Crossing in London's West End is a fascinating location to study human in all their technicolour glory. This woman inspired me. She was so colourful against the neutral tones of the buildings and roads that I decided to block out the neutral tones and leave the people in colour. I found the isolation of one person quite interesting, as this lady was all about the colour, popping out of the middle of the shot but when I applied it more subtly to a group it became interesting as a statement of intention.

People In Transit

When I looked at the group portraits of people in transit, I realised that I could use a more subtle technique to isolate the colourful people from the neutral backgrounds by using a slice across the image. The results are more subtle than I expected and another unexpected observation emerged

City Folk Wear Darks

It's long been a dry observation that many people in London wear dark or neutral tones as if blending into the background. It's a serious way of dressing and perhaps one that is also seasonal. (Summer sees more colour). Also age groups, younger people tend to wear more bright colours and also occupation can lend a more serious and colourless uniform to the populace.

Take Away the Colour

When you begin to subtract colour as a photographer you are focusing the viewers mind on shape and composition. Taking away or leaving colour out of an image can help bring out different aspects. I like black and white photography for that fact. Often, when we look at old photographs from a time when colour film was rare, we lament the lack of colour for what it would have told us about the clothes people wore and the way they decorated their lives. This is something I became aware of as I was processing them. I have attempted to both use colour to focus and remove colour to refocus the viewers attention. It is perhaps an extension of my investigations into focal depth perception in painting where I have rendered the central objects of attention with a finer stroke, leaving the periphery more impressionistic, similar to how our eyes see, (how our brain processes the huge visual information we are constantly receiving.)

Light

In this last shot the streak of sunlight seems to enhance the effect as if the rest of the image is in dark, which it isn't. It is in shadow and so much of city life is lived in the shadows that it made me think about how our perception and our feelings are coloured by the occlusion of light in a city. London is undergoing a transformation at the moment. For a long time, tall buildings were subject to much scrutiny and now our sunlit streets begin to disappear as tall skyscrapers steal the light for their executive sky dwelling workers, who bask in sunshine Ironically these office based people put blinds up as soon as they can so that they can see their computer screens, while pedestrians walk in shadow below them.