Pixiq

 On The Paris Metro

Photos & text © 2010 Steve Meltzer

I think that a good photographer is an experimenter and a risk taker. I’m one of those restless types who is rarely satisfied with the usual photos of faces and mountains, cute tigers and lions and bears oh my! These images leave me cold. Been there, seen that and shot it.

I don’t want to make another Eiffel Tower at night or a sunset over Mt. Rainier shot. I want to go deeper, to explore the medium of photography itself. I want to try to stretch myself and one way to do that is to set myself photo challenges.

Last year I was in Paris and I set myself the assignment of documenting life on the Paris Metro. Sure it has been done before but I wanted to combine photojournalistic images with color travel photography to produce a set of pictures that would convey the feeling of riding on the Metro. At the least to create images of the Metro that had not been seen before.

To make the assignment more difficult and more challenging I decided to limit myself to a small camera with a limited zoom range (a Lumix LX3) and to use it at low ISO speed (100) so that I would be shooting at slow shutter speeds (under 1/30^th of a second) and getting some blur to help convey the sense of the train's motion.

Millions of people ride the Metro daily and most of them are the people who keep Paris running. They live in residential neighborhoods outside of the center of the City or in one of the suburbs that ring it.

The Metro is essential to their lives and riding the train you see a cross section of Parisian life. Young couples hauling baby strollers onto the train on their way to a Sunday outing at the Luxembourg Gardens or people hauling furniture home that they’ve just bought at some flea market. This was the enrgy I was looking to capture.

“Color has emotional meaning,” the German philosopher Fredrick Nietzsche wrote in an essay. While the exact emotional content varies by culture—white is the color of mourning in some cultures rather than black—a photographer needs to be aware of the emotional effect color carries. My task was to find color and use it in photojournalistic images.

 ut shooting in the real world, as opposed to a studio, it is more difficult to work with color. You have to be aware that you need to look for color and then be lucky enough to find colors that work together with the subject of your images.

The photo of the nuns waiting on a platform illustrates what I mean. Their gray habits almost match the platform gray making for a very monochromatic image and that then emphasizes the nun’s faces.

That was a lucky moment that I first glanced out of the corner of my eye and shot just as the train I was on left the station.

Summing it all up: self-assignments are a great way to get your creative juices flowing.