Matias Bilbao:
Subtlety Is the Best Policy
What originated as a love for warm-toned black and white images developed into an appreciation for the subtleties of muted colours. I think it’s just too easy to photograph for the sake of colour, and traditionally, most of the images that rely on it die off. A professor of mine once told me, “The world is in colour, but life is in black and white”.
I do not mean to say that I don’t ever use colour to persuade, but it takes originality and substance to keep the viewer interested. Good work has always been a matter of content and context. Whether it’s a beautiful model or a documentary on bullfighters, content is complemented by colour, never the other way around, even when it’s a simple addition of a cast or tone. Very rarely do we speak of colour when we are not overpowered by it, and yet we all seem to enjoy sepia and warm-toned images, describing them as classic and timeless. It is this use of colour subtlety that keeps the image’s content intact and lets us enjoy the image, not the colour.
When I photograph, I make decisions subconsciously depending on what I know will be the final colours of my image — a habit I realised I had after many years of photographing. Despite using digital cameras, which capture in colour, what I shoot when thinking in colour is in no way similar to how I visualise when I am photographing to output for toned black and white images, which I consider to be coloured.
These are my colours. They represent not just my interests but also my attitude towards my subject matter. Less is more. Too much colour and you run the risk of overshadowing the purpose of photographing in the first place: to expose.
