This lady had the biggest selection of chickens in the market. She impassively swept a small mop from side to side -- keeping the flies away. The greatest strength of this image is its incongruity, at least to a Western viewer. To those of us not used to seeing a table full of dead chickens with feet up in the air being serenaded by lady with a feather duster,
this image might come as a shock to the senses.
You can see the color version of this image in a travel article I posted on my Laos trip at:
http://www.worldisround.com/articles/139137/photo61.html . It is an excellent travel picture. Its an exotic image that conveys a sense of place very well in terms of its reality. Its colors are part of that reality. The yellow chickens, her pink duster (and matching pink shirt), and the many colors of a busy market behind her, all work to give the viewer a good sense of this chaotic Laotian market scene.
Now abstract all of that by converting it to black and white. The yellow color that gave these chickens their immediate identity vanishes and they chickens essentially become creatures. The colors of the marketplace behind this lady no longer compete for our attention. We become fixated on those dead birds that ask us a big question what is going on here? We must study it a bit more closely to find out. And that is what abstraction does so well. It asks questions and demands answers of the viewer. This becomes a more personal image in black and white, more challenging to the imagination, and considerably more incongruous as well.
Whether or not we convert this image from color to black and white is not a matter of right or wrong, good or bad. It depends upon how we want to use the picture and what we want to say to our viewers. I feel this shot worked very well in color in my travel article on worldisround.com. But if I wanted to make my viewers think, wonder, and feel black and white would be my choice here.