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Like a lot of people, I’m really digging that black has become so prevalent in home décor. I love the way it defines space when used on ceiling beams, windows, and frames. I love the sculptural form it brings to faucets and light fixtures, and the way even a little of it can change the depth of shadows in a room. I love the graphic punch of a bold black tile, especially when it’s married with navy blues and dark greens. I love the way it works with golds of every hue, and silver, and bronze, and stainless steel, and whites of every sheen, and glass, and wood, and stone.

More than anything else, perhaps, I  love to see black and white  photography used as art. Which is why I gasped when I recently went on the Ffotoimage site  – an online collection of 40,000 fine art photographs overseen by the Stephen Bulger Gallery. I was there researching a piece on online shopping for the Toronto Star (I’ll add the link when it goes live). The first image I saw was by Lutz Dille, a German photographer who started working in still and documentary photography in Canada in the 60s. (Ignoramus alert — I’d never heard of him).

This series comes from street photography done in Paris and New York City in the late fifties and early sixties. I am entranced by how vivid the subjects seem, and how much I think I can infer about them from the shot. To me, it’s stunning story-telling. Unfortunately, I don’t have the $20,000 or so I’d need to get the series, so I’ll just have to content myself to looking at them here. As perhaps will you.

Beautiful, no?