Images from the Middle East and Africa are often hard news,
drained of colour and tough to look at, so a fun picture of people laughing
that is stuffed full of colour caught my eye. Compositionally, Sumaya Hisham’s
picture is nothing special. The event has been orchestrated and its news value
is pretty low. But look at everyone’s face. They are just enjoying the moment
and it’s that captured moment - smiles, eyes, teeth and hands - that makes me
feel good.
On the theme of colour, I struggled to choose between two of
Zohra Bensema’s pictures so I will share them both. The first is a corridor of
clothing, like the wardrobe in C.S Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
but much brighter, leading you to the biggest smile of the week, even though it
quite small in the frame. The second is composed of blues, yellows, red and
purples and the most eclectic set of portraits you can imagine. For the life of
me I cannot find a link.
In Feisal Omar’s picture your eye is troubled by the chaos
of what is going on and cannot quite settle. It might be the colour, the two
men larking about, the random criss-crossing of the building structure or even
the raw meat hanging from the rack. It
takes a while to get to grips with what is actually going on. These men have
set up their butcher’s shop a day after it was destroyed by a bomb blast, so no
wonder we feel unsettled. It’s hard to
imagine what they are feeling.
The more closely you look at Mohamed al-Sayaghi’s picture
the better it gets. First you get the white sleeved arm sweeping in from the
right to meet the bold black shape that stretches into fingers at the focal
point of the child’s squished face. The mouth pushed open, highlights catching
the boy’s eyes, and then at last you see the tiny droplet of vaccination caught
perfectly between dropper and mouth.
There is no escaping the strong diagonal that leads from bottom right to top left in Amr Abdullah Dalsh’s picture. Visually it’s like a hill that is being climbed. I love the bold shapes and the blacks and reds that are not only in the clothing but echoed in the writing on the wall. Maybe it’s my imagination, but it feels like the child is reaching up to achieve something for the future, the mother is busy working hard to achieve something now and the abstract figure looks like some free and futuristic symbol sprinting away. Is the writing on the wall? Enjoy the full story here
An interesting swirling composition in Ronen Zvulun’s
picture is enhanced by the yellow neon of the night lights. It gives us an
almost abstract bird’s eye view of a demonstration in Jerusalem. It’s only
after we have looked at this for a while that the surrounded vehicles give us a
clue to scale and a figurative sense.
It’s officially colour week and I am always a sucker for
complimentary colours, reds and greens especially. Add a strong sense of scale,
as Muhammad Hamed has done in his picture, and it’s almost a dead cert for my
weekly selection. What saves the visual flow of this picture is that the child
is looking directly out of the frame and not out to the right of the picture,
as that would have destroyed the flow.
No comments:
Post a Comment