On Contrast
With, you guessed it, more photos from Italy.
Welcome to the Tuesday UnRecipe post for all subscribers, yet another photo essay. On Friday, paid subscribers will receive a recipe featuring one of my favorite fall breakfasts. As always, thank you for being here! Learn more about my work here and browse past editions here.
In most forms of storytelling, tension is good. It creates a dynamism—a story with tension is one that you can’t stop reading, watching, looking at. In photography, tension can come from many components, but as you may have already guessed based on my last few photo essays, this photo story features tension as created through color.
Color creates tension when it contrasts with another color featured in the image. Here, there are lots of oranges set against greens. The warm tones of melon and orange peel against rich greens creates a pull: does the photo feel warm or cool to you?
In the other three photos, there’s a different kind of contrast. It’s within the same color family—that tan-orange-yellow spectrum—but they’re shown in varying shades of lightness and darkness. The wooden grooves of old rolling pins and window grates darkened with laundry are the perfect places to explore the contrasting shades of color and how they create such distinct, intense shapes in our eyes.
As I put together each of these photo essays, I thought a lot about contrast. In what order would I represent these photos for you to see? Which photos looked too similar, creating a ho-hum feeling if they sat next to each other? Which photos were so different, so arresting in their contrast that they caught your eye and imagination? No essay better represented that feeling than this one. Enlarge each of the photos to view them individually, then come back and look at them in the gallery. All of the sudden, things look a little more interesting.
See you back here on Friday for pumpkin bread pudding! Have a wonderful week in the meantime.