Berlin, Summer 2023. The city dressed in its most vivid colours. The camera chose otherwise.
Beyond the Colours is a black-and-white photographic documentation of Berlins´ Christopher Street Day – a deliberate counter-image to the spectacle. Stripped of colour, what remains are faces, gestures, and moments of quiet humanity within the crowd.
On Choosing Black and White at the Loudest Day of the Year.
Christopher Street Day is designed to be seen in colour. Rainbow flags, glitter, neon, the whole visual grammar of celebration turned up to its maximum volume. To photograph it in black and white is, in a sense, to disobey the day itself. It is to ask what remains when the loudest layer is taken away.
What remains, it turns out, is quite a lot.
Stripped of colour, a crowd stops being a wall of costume and becomes a collection of faces again. A hand raised in a wave. Someone on the phone in the middle of a parade, half-elsewhere, tethered to a conversation the street can’t hear. Three men toasting in the sun, rain capes on despite the clear sky, laughing at nothing in particular. A kiss. A fist raised, more triumph than protest. These are not the images CSD produces for itself — the ones built for a feed, engineered for colour, engineered for scale. These are the images that happen anyway, underneath.
That’s the counter-image this series is after: not a rejection of the spectacle, but a second look past it. The spectacle is real and it matters — visibility built this day, decade by decade, out of exactly the loudness it’s now criticised for. But loudness has a way of becoming its own subject. The eye adjusts to rainbow the way it adjusts to any recurring stimulus — after a while, it stops really seeing it. Monochrome resets that. It forces the picture to earn attention through gesture, gaze, timing — through the actual grammar of photography — rather than through colour doing the emotional work for free.
There’s also something quieter at stake. Underneath the costumes and the crowns and the performance, CSD is, at its root, a day of ordinary humans being visibly, unapologetically themselves in public. Black and white doesn’t erase the flamboyance on display here — it simply insists that flamboyance and humanity aren’t opposites. A drag performer’s raised hand and a stranger’s half-searching glance through the crowd belong to the same register once colour stops sorting them into „spectacle“ and „background.“
Photography, for me, has always been a form of listening rather than announcing. Beyond the Colours listens to Christopher Street Day the way I try to listen to this city more broadly — waiting for the frame that isn’t performing, the moment between the poses, the second where someone forgets the camera is there. Colour asks to be looked at. Black and white asks to be looked into.
Why It Took So Long
These photographs are from 2023. I only published them in the summer of 2026. Three years lie in between.
It was not a lack of time. It was doubt.
Christopher Street Day is made for colour. Bright, diverse, joyful. That is its intention. I had photographed it in black and white, and the question stayed with me: am I allowed to? Black and white can also be read as loss. Not as calm, but as mourning.
Eventually, I published the series anyway.
Shortly afterwards, at Christopher Street Day 2026, something terrible happened on the margins of the event.
The pictures were already online. They are still the same pictures. Their context is not.
Since then, I have been asking myself questions I cannot answer.
May a photographer experiment this far without creating another reading?
Does the reading of an image belong to the person who made it, or to the moment in which someone looks?
Can a picture outlive its context?
I don’t know. I am leaving the questions standing. Just like the pictures.
The city, that day, was as vivid as it has ever been. The camera simply chose to remember it in the register that outlasts the glitter — in faces, not filters.
concept, photography & Audio Essay: Leyla Dirim
Explore the complete visual work on Leyla Dirim Photography.
This essay is also available as an audio version, narrated in two languages: English and German.
Dieser Essay ist auch als Audiofassung verfügbar, vertont in zwei Sprachen: Englisch und Deutsch.
Listen on Spotify (English) | Auf Spotify hören (Deutsch)