Sometimes, you take a photo not because it’s well composed, but because its meaning strikes you.
This photo follows a few basic rules of composition: framing the subject, frames within frames, subject centered.
But that’s not why I took it. When I moved to Scotland many years ago, I was surprised by how white it was. I grew up in Paris. It’s very multicultural, there are people from all parts of the world living there. When I went to school, half my class were descendants of some exotic part of the world. That was normal to me. I got used to Scotland’s whiteness, but it always rang wrong.
Oslo is much worse. It is so unbelievably white. Apart from recent refugees, there are no colours. I was talking to a taxi driver in Oslo once. He was from Rwanda and had ended up in Norway when he fled his country. Europe has a scheme in which it distributes refugees across its members and even though he had requested France or the UK, he was sent to Norway. He described what a shock it was when he landed there in December with his family coming straight from Central Africa’s summer. The reason he was a taxi driver was that he was a nurse in Rwanda, but his qualifications weren’t recognised in Norway, so he was requalifying to become a nurse again.
So when I saw that guy on the tram, I thought he was out of place. I had to take a photo to record the moment. He watched me and didn’t seem to happy about it. I guess he was wondering why I was taking his photo for no reason. He might have got worried, even, and I wondered if I should keep the photo. But then it wa taken and I didn’t know who he was, so whether I kept it or not made no difference to him.
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