Chris Steele-Perkins - Micayla Bransfield

Chris Steele-Perkins, “BENIN and GHANA. 1983. Bread distributed to refugees from Ghana.”

This Chris Steele-Perkins photograph interested me because of the image’s composition, sharp black and white contrast, and the photographer’s vantage point.  Vertically, the image is sharply divided into three areas, with one line to either side of the bread falling through the middle third of the image.  This division into thirds, while created by the clustering of objects in the foreground, is heightened by the contrast between the centralized bread and woman, and the darker background.  The photograph’s black and white contrast is presumably created through the photographer’s use of flash.  Horizontally, there is a line drawn a little above the middle of the image by the fingers of the woman’s reaching hands.  What also interests me is that the Steele-Perkins is looking down on the scene he is photographing.  He was therefore most likely on the back of the truck from which bread is being thrown to the refugees.  While his vantage complicates the scale of the subjects, it seems like Steele-Perkins used a normal lens, and the effect is that the viewer is inserted into the action, in the space of the falling bread.