The public square in front of Paris’s city hall was undergoing construction work when Mélissa David took this photograph as she passed by en route to an appointment. She had taken her camera along in the hope of taking some pictures, but when she realised she had forgotten to charge the batteries, she used her phone instead.
“It seemed like an ordinary sunny day in Paris, the city full of busy people,” the French photographer recalls. “There were these big panels with images printed on them installed in front of the city hall to shield some of the building work. The light was beautiful, and I wanted to capture the strong shadows of these strangers passing by around the girl with the balloons.”
The image was spontaneous and the variety of postures authentic. David later edited the image using Photoshop Express, something she doesn’t mind admitting. “Editing is completely a part of the creative process,” she says.
Along the way, she converted the colour image to black and white: “Monochrome feels to me like a way of trying to find poetry in everyday life.”
David notes that when she takes pictures, she “doesn’t think about the viewers” first. “I believe my photos reveal a lot about myself,” she says. “Like a connection between how I feel inside and what I see outside.
“People see things or interpret my photos in ways I don’t expect. It reveals their own feelings and visions, and I love it when this happens. Then the image doesn’t belong only to me any more.”
