Page 82 - Amateur Photographer - August 5, 2017

Photo Critique

Final Analysis

Roger Hicks considers…

‘Girl with Hat’, by Xiomara Bender © XIOMARA BENDER

t’s hard to believe this picture was strangest of them all. There is presumably white. Did I choose it because I ‘see’ in
taken in the last few years, but some Korean cultural tradition that black & white? I don’t think so. Rather, I
Xiomara Bender’s book, North involves pretty girls wearing improbable think, I chose it because it is outside time;
I Korea: The Power of Dreams hats, but in a sense it doesn’t really matter because it is so unlike anything I have
(Kehrer Verlag 2017) is illustrated across what it is: the picture lives and dies by its seen or can readily imagine seeing. Why,
the course of three trips beginning in 2012. own strangeness. for that matter, did the photographer
If someone told you it was taken in the It’s quite easy to criticise: the cropped choose black & white? Was it merely a
1950s, or even the 1920s, you would not be fi gure on the left, the strange light on the practical consideration: avoiding, for
very surprised. Partly, of course, this is older woman’s face, the sprig-like object in example, the gaudy colours, verging on
because of the strange time warp that is the lower right-hand corner. But without garish and gimcrack, that seem so popular
North Korea. For a biological parallel, its ‘faults’, it would be sterile: a crop would in Korea? Or what?
albeit on a timescale a million times lose context, never mind charm. Likewise, It would be easy to persuade oneself
longer, consider the coelacanth. People call the way the girl is looking away is an that this picture didn’t fi t in the book; or
it a ‘living fossil’, but this is only a part essential part of the picture. We see her perhaps, anywhere. Quite apart from the
truth. Today’s coelacanths are not the the way the photographer saw her, the way ‘fl aws’ above, there is a popular and often
same as the fi sh of 65 million years ago; we would have seen her if we had been justifi ed prejudice against mixing black &
which was when, until 1938, they were there. It’s very much the way we see; or white and colour. But again, it doesn’t
thought to have become extinct. at least, the way I see. matter. It’s a question of (justifi ed)
This ‘time-warp evolution’ is what gives Which is an interesting question in self-confi dence, of the photographer
her book its fascinating alien quality, and itself. Of the 11 of Bender’s pictures I could believing in her own work; which is
why I chose this picture as possibly the have used, this was the only one in black & something we all need.

Roger Hicks has been writing about photography since 1981 and has published more than three dozen books on the subject, many in partnership with his wife Frances Schultz (visit his new website
at www.rogerandfrances.eu). Every week in this column Roger deconstructs a classic or contemporary photograph. Next week he considers an image by Sibylle Bergemann

82 5 August 2017 I www.amateurphotographer.co.uk I subscribe 0330 333 1113