His snaps click
International street photographer Eric
Kim captures ordinary moments of
everyday life that tell stories
International street photographer Eric Kim believes in celebrating ordinary moments of life, be it a young couple sharing a kiss on a bench or an old man walking down the street. “Street photography is all about capturing the beauty in the ordinary moments of everyday
life; capturing images that tell stories on their own like a grandma chasing after her little grand daughter running on the street. These are so very ordinary moments but when you look at these photographs it reminds you what it is to be human.”
Eric, who was in Mumbai recently to conduct full time workshops on street photography, as part of a series of workshops around the world, found the experience “overwhelming”.
“Initially not many people knew about street photography in Mumbai, even though Mumbai is one of the best places in the world to do it. But gradually there was a huge demand and people attended the workshops and through street photography, they began to see Mumbai in a way they had never seen before” he says.
Of late, street photography has started involving a lot of juxtapositions. It involves a lot of contrasts, like photographing a tall person next to a short person or getting a beggar to stand next to a brand new Porsche car. Eric elaborates, “A lot of these contrasts are highly evident in Mumbai and a lot of them involve humour too. So if you look at a photograph and you laugh because there is something odd or weird about it, that makes a great photograph too.”
Eric has visited a lot of places around the world for his shooting assignments such as London, Rome, Florence, Venice, Prague and some parts of Korea. He intends to come to India again the next year. “I’d like to do more of street photography and sometime in 2012 or 2013, I’d like to publish a book on India. I have already got ten good photos from Mumbai. Now, I’d like to go to Northern,
Eastern and Southern India. Hopefully if I can get ten great images in each city, it would make a great book.”
Asked why he prefers to shoot in black and white, Eric says, “I don’t look for colours, rather I look for the shapes, the composition, the lines, the shadows and the expressions.”
He prefers ‘black and white’ also because he likes his images to be simple and clean and doesn’t like colours to distract him. He quotes a famous photographer, “We see the world in colour, so to shoot in black and white transcends reality and makes you see the world in a different way.”
