Beyond colour: How Aduragbemi Okeyemi reimagines London’s Shard through photography

An art review of The Shard, from the photography series What Eye See

Black and white photography has a unique ability to transform familiar scenes into striking visual experiences. Without the immediate colourful attractions, the viewer is usually drawn to the main elements of the photograph, which are the light, shadow, texture, form and perspective. With these elements, an ordinary image takes on a new meaning, taking photography from a simple act of documentation into an expression of artistic interpretation, drawing attention to what is not visibly seen.

Other than the extraordinary height of the famous landmark piercing into the darkness, its angular glass architecture rising with an almost theatrical sense of ambition, what makes this picture of The Shard exceptional is the way the photographer has deliberately stripped the iconic monument of its reality.

In this striking black and white composition, Aduragbemi invites the viewers to reconsider what it means to see an actual photograph of The Shard. Stripped of its original colour, the popular and familiar London landmark becomes something surreal. It becomes a study in geometry, contrast, texture, light and shadow. Here, The Shard is no longer just a building captured by his camera but an exploration of form, perspective and visual emotion.

The Shard is one of the photographs featured in the documentary photography series by Aduragbemi Okeyemi titled What Eye See. A project he intended to establish his view about why black and white photography is the most genuine form of fine art photography, not because colour lacks artistic merit but because stripping an image of its colour reveals something different from the familiar, inviting the viewers to see what must have remained unnoticed, where the photographer is not really taking anything away from the photograph but revealing what was there all along.

With The Shard, Aduragbemi revealed the relationship between light and architecture; the glass becomes a detailed arrangement of silver lines and luminous surfaces against a dark sky, making the building’s architectural language more coherent so we can see its construction and not just its appearance. With the composition of the photograph, He exaggerates the building’s verticality with the dramatic low-angle perspective, giving it a monumental presence.

In this image of The Shard by Aduragbemi, just like other photos in the project, one of the greatest achievements is that the black is not necessarily an absence of illumination but an active element of composition.

To sum it up, black and white does not automatically make a photograph fine art; its authenticity does not rely on just the absence of colour but on the intention and visual intelligence of the artist, which is central to the argument of the project What Eye See.

Aduragbemi Okeyemi is a Nigerian fine art and documentary photographer based in Kent, UK. His photograph The Shard, like every other photograph featured in the project, has been exhibited in various galleries in London and Kent. Also featured in a few publications, such as the DI online issue of the Royal Photographic Society England.