On #MonochromeMarch by Ian J. Battaglia
On #MonochromeMarch by Ian J. Battaglia
Diary
I’m happy to share this guest post written by a good friend, whose thoughtful way of seeing and photographing the world I’ve always appreciated.
Since moving to Tokyo in the Spring of last year, my photography has been at something of a crossroads. Despite making street photography for over a decade, and having worked full-time as a photographer, I’ve had this lingering feeling that there’s something missing in my work—a small but noticeable gap between where my photography is, and where I want it to be.
I spent some time this Winter curating all of my work as I rebuilt my photography portfolio site, and while there are a few themes in my work, many of my photographs seem to stand alone. I believe you can tell the frames are mine, that they possess something of my voice, my eye—but too often I felt they weren’t in conversation with one another. More often than not, my photographs didn’t speak to something bigger than simply capturing an appealing frame.
After moving to Tokyo and starting a new job away from photography, I was given the opportunity to rethink my approach to my own work. Of course, simply being immersed in a new environment, especially one so completely different to what I was used to has led to a new way of seeing. Beyond just the shape of the streets, the language on the signs, everything about Tokyo is different—right down to the light. Being in Tokyo has also brought me in contact with a rich community through exhibitions, meetups, and photowalks. I’ve been lucky enough to meet with a number of photographers here who’ve helped start me off on a new path.
I told Anson many of these thoughts back in February, in a basement coffeeshop in Shinjuku. We’d spent the morning wandering the neighborhood, making photographs in the heavy snow, and we’d come here to chat and warm up.
His solution was simple: “Why not do a photo project?” he asked.
Anson’s suggestion came at a welcome time. I’ve thought about doing my own photography project for years now, and even taken an online course from Alec Soth through Magnum on building one. But I made the decision to move to Tokyo while in the midst of my planning, and since then, I’d put everything on the backburner.
I told Anson I had been thinking of doing something simple: #MonochromeMarch, where I’d make only black and white photographs for the month of March (fairly self-explanatory!) Anson pushed me to do it, but to put some further restrictions on the project: at the end of the month, I should settle on just three select frames. I accepted his challenge, flipped my M10-P into monochrome mode, and was ready to go.
Monochrome has always had a place in my heart—I’ve used “Monochromatic Aberration” as the name of my blog for many years. In fact, this project isn’t even the first time in my life I’ve shot black and white exclusively. I spent a year as a university student with nothing but a Leica M6 TTL, a single 35mm lens, and rolls and rolls of HP5+. However, my desire to take my photography “more seriously” and also, you know, make rent, ended up pushing me towards professional work rather than my personal street photography, and to both digital and color. Slowly, the amount of black and white I shot tapered off, in both my professional and personal work. I’ve been eager to get back to monochrome after more or less years away, and to see how the experience I’ve since gained with light and composition would inform this new work.
Just before I moved to Tokyo, I consolidated my photography gear and returned to Leica, picking up an M10-P to pair with my Minolta CLE. As readers here surely know, photographing on rangefinders is simply a different beast compared to SLR-style systems. As I was re-learning those differences over the past year, switching to monochrome further highlighted them. Without color, the moment, light, and composition became even more important in my photographs.
While the idea of photographing only one format isn’t quite as immediately cohesive as something like photographing newlyweds around Niagara Falls (as in Alec Soth’s case in Niagara), it did offer me a consistent frame through which to conceptualize and view my own photographs.
Over the course of the month, I ended up making over a thousand photographs, which is generally quite high for me. I think this is both because of the excitement of having a project to shoot towards, and also out of a desire to ensure I got a couple of frames I was truly proud of by the end of it. This number definitely would’ve been lower had I been using film instead of digital, but capturing such a quantity of frames also allowed me the space to capture a range of different work.
I’m already the sort of person who brings my camera everywhere I go, but over the month, I brought my camera to the office, to social outings, on dates, to photowalks, etc., in addition to my normal photography practice, wandering around a neighborhood making photographs as frames catch my eye. Because of the (slight, self-imposed) pressure of needing to produce photographs, I found the month strongly focused on photography than usual in a way I found really enjoyable.
I also found myself more willing to do a bit more experimentation than I normally am. Perhaps something about doing a project gave me the freedom to allow myself to play around, but I ended up experimenting with different focal lengths and techniques, such as shutter dragging.
This level of “play” carried through to my post production as well. Even though I was using digital, I found myself wanting to make contact sheets, to view the frames of a day as a whole. After all, part of the goal was to simply think of my work more cohesively rather than on a photo by photo basis. I suspect I was also influenced by Henri Cartier-Bresson, as I was reading a book of interviews with the master photographer during the project. On contact sheets, he says:
“My contact sheets are my memory, my intimate diary.”
“A contact sheet is so interesting, because you see how a photographer thinks. He comes closer and closer to a subject, corrects it, looks at it again, and then with tiny movements turns around until it is in exactly the right and exact relation to him. Contact sheets may be compared to the way you drive a nail into a plank. First you give several light taps to build up a rhythm and align the nail with the wood. Then, much more quickly, and with as few strokes as possible, you hit the nail forcefully on the head and drive it in.”
Just as he says, by the end of the month, these contact sheets became both a record of my days, and a view of my thought process. You can see the places I lingered, where something caught my attention and I waited for everything to line up just so.
Finally, it was fun to watch the project unfold over the course of the month. As a writer, I’m used to working almost in secret, and sending work out into the world only when I’m sure it’s gone as far as I can take it. But for this project, I shared my photos each week on Instagram. I quickly developed a style of presenting the photographs with a border, helping to show that the frames weren’t arbitrary, but carefully considered. I used Figma to experiment with sequencing and laying out my photographs, finding disparate frames that went together in my mind, which directly informed the posts I made during the project. Altogether, these different apps changed the way I thought about the work while I was making it.
As promised, here are the three photographs I’ve selected as the “winners” from this project:
This first photograph was captured during one of the first outings of the month. It’s in Shinjuku, where the project started. I’m often searching for these sorts of hard cuts of light, the deep contrast in the city. Here, I choose to get much lower than I usually do, and then waited for the right subject to enter the frame. I like the translucency of the flowers in the Sun, and of course the glance over from the salaryman crossing the frame.
The second frame was captured from one of the lounges of the ANA Intercontinental Hotel in Akasaka, Tokyo. Work brought me here, and I was transfixed by this view. I’ve come to love deep focus as I’ve returned to using rangefinders, and in this frame, you can see from Tokyo to Mount Fuji. I’m really impressed by the detail in this shot, and happy with the way the light falls across the landscape.
Finally, this last photograph was captured in Dogenzaka, Shibuya. I’d just come from an incredible exhibition, and was feeling particularly inspired, as I often am leaving a gallery. I stopped to capture this frame in front of a ramen restaurant. You see these plastic sheets in front of restaurants fairly often, especially izakaya and ramen shops. Beyond simply obscuring the figures, I love the way it softens the tonality of the frame, and the texture it adds. This is actually a pretty extreme crop of a wider frame (I was shooting 28mm at the time), another technique I don’t often do!
Of course, these aren’t the only photographs I’m happy with over the course of the month; but I’m a man of my word! I ended up with just under 30 photographs I’m happy with, and probably five or so I would consider portfolio-worthy. Capturing 27 selects out of 1044 photographs is equal to a 2.58% hit rate; and that might be generous.
Photographing #MonochromeMarch gave me exactly what I was hoping for. It gave me a context to consider my work in, and a critical distance to see what fit and what didn’t. It further honed my sensitivity to light and composition, and gave me the space to play around with photography again rather than only doing things I feel confident in.
With this one under my belt, I’ve got a few more photography projects in mind, and I’m looking forward to being able to turn my attention to them.
Thanks to Anson for giving me this space to share my work and thoughts about this project, and of course for pushing me to do it in the first place!
For more of the finished images, check out my Instagram, and to see my full contact sheets and hear more about the behind the scenes, check out my blog and newsletter.
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