SHADES OF GREY

All the pictures in Chris Smith’s Gods of Sport exhibition are black and white. A couple shot in colour were converted to mono because, as he says, ‘it would have looked odd if there were two or three pictures in colour...’

“The thing about black and white is you had to look at things differently because, obviously, everything is in colour, but black-and-white photography still holds up. You’re looking at it differently because, in black and white, you had to isolate the subject from a background. Crudely speaking, in colour if you’ve got a red subject and a green background, the two colours separate because they are so different. In black and white, they’re just shades of grey, both of them, so you had to find a way to blow the background out totally to make the subject stand out, or isolate the figure you were concentrating on in a different way. You had to think quite a lot about what your background was and where you wanted to take the picture, and when.”