Black and White

Most of the photographs I’ve seen by Ali Ghalam-Siah are sports images or snapshots from his travels around various places, but I’ve also seen a few pictures of animals by him that always make me pause; there’s a moment and quality in these pictures that are truly captivating. Among them, the picture of two white swans in the dark water stands out the most for me. It’s a color photograph, yet its beauty lies in its black and white essence. Somehow, it unintentionally draws me toward the American modernist photographers—most of all Edward Weston with his iridescent shell photograph shaped like a swan and that dead pelican picture that boldly displays its sculptural beauty. But these swans, with their heads submerged in the water, make me nostalgic for beauty, for seeing the details of the picture, for the sensation of feather caresses, and for solitude and quiet (with that whisper or unseen kiss beneath the water). That beauty which, in a single instant, is captured by light and camera to say: these are two swans—and that is the miracle of the eye and the camera. Just that.