Colour as Emotion in Street Photography.

Long before I lift my camera, my eyes react to the red of a passing saree, the deep yellow of a Kolkata taxi, or the turquoise tarpaulins floating above a market street. For me, colour is never just a visual experience; it is an emotional one. It sets the mood of a frame before the subject even announces itself. In India, colour is woven into our culture, our rituals, our expressions, and our daily life. It is the rhythm of our streets.

As someone who walks through these streets every day with a camera, I’ve realised that the emotion of a moment often lives inside its colours. A single shade can calm a chaotic frame, intensify a portrait, or pull me into a story I wasn’t expecting to find. Many times, I don’t even remember the subject of a photograph; I remember the feeling the colour left behind.

Even though I’ve done far less black and white photography in my own work, I’ve never stopped admiring it. Whenever I scroll through social media or sit quietly in front of the small photobook library I’m trying to build at home, black and white images always make me pause. They feel like the kind of photographs you don’t just look at, but absorb.

My recent addition to the shelf, GOLD by Sebastião Salgado, has been a huge inspiration. The weight, silence, and power in those monochrome frames moved me deeply and pushed me to write this Substack for my readers. It reminded me how photography, whether in colour or in monochrome, is ultimately about emotion.

And while colour is my instinct, black and white holds a different kind of power, one that I’ve come to respect deeply. I see black and white photography not as an absence of colour, but as the presence of something purer. It is a way of listening to the photograph rather than looking at it. Without colour, the weight of light becomes clearer. Faces feel more honest. The smallest gestures gain importance. Shadows develop a voice of their own.

Monochrome allows an image to breathe without distraction; it strips everything down to mood, form, and emotion. There are moments when colour would only interfere, when the story feels more timeless, more grounded, when the silence in a scene needs to be heard. Black and white carries a rare stillness, an elegance, a simplicity that pushes me to slow down and see more deeply. It teaches me to value light, texture, and emotion in their rawest form.

That is why I never compare colour and monochrome; I simply feel them differently. Colour pulls you into the energy of a moment into celebration, chaos, movement, and life. Black and white invites you into the soul of a moment into reflection, silence, and intimacy.

Both are honest in their own ways, and I choose between them based on the story the frame wants to tell. If colour is emotion, then black and white is memory. If colour speaks loudly, black and white whispers. And in the world of photography, both have their place, both hold their own truth, and both shape the way I experience the world through my lens.

Till next time,

Shivam