I’ve struggled with color for several years now. I can be pretty slow on the uptake – try as I might I haven’t been able to get the same gut punch with color as I can with b/w, and I’ve quickly abandoned it.
It finally occurred to me that I won’t get the same punch with it and it’s an exercise in frustration to try. Color speaks in a different voice. It has a voice of it’s own, and if I let it be what it is, and let it speak in it’s own voice, I can get along with it just fine. It can even be pretty good.
Years back when I was a kid, the late 50s and early 60s, I used to play around with a Kodak Brownie Starflex that my parents had once given me for Christmas. I used 127 roll film, usually Verichrome Pan, occasionally Kodacolor for color. I never used it seriously, I would just run around taking snapshots once in awhile. Sometimes I would use my dad’s Argoflex. A simple twin lens box that used 620 film. We’d take them down to the local drugstore to get developed, and a week or so later I’d get back these square prints with a white border and a date stamp along the edge. Those snapshots were magic.
Years later, in the mid-70s, I got more interested in photography. I bought myself a reasonably good 35mm SLR, a Yashica TL Electro. I got some Kodacolor film and started snapping. I was hooked. I added a Yashicamat TLR to my bag, and tried some black and white film too. Tri-X for the 35 and the venerable Verichrome Pan for the 120. I started shooting and never looked back.
Then I made the grave mistake of thinking ‘man, this would be a great way to make a living. I’m gonna be a pro’. I read everything I could get my hands on about being a professional photographer. I followed all the accepted advice, did what I thought you had to do, and quickly settled in to a certain level of mediocrity. It ruined me for years.
These days I shoot with nothing but a phone. Have for about ten years. For me it’s the perfect instrument. I can do everything I want to do with it, and it slides right into my pocket. I often start to take myself too seriously. I start to think too hard about making ‘art’, which is fine, but it can start to take the fun and spontaneity out of it. Every now and then I just go out and take snapshots like I did as a kid, both black and white and color, just take what I get out of the camera without any post-processing except for the border and date stamp. Back to the basics. It’s very freeing, and you know something? The magic is still there if you let yourself find it.
I’ve been working with color quite a bit lately, and I have mixed feelings about it. I’ve gotten the colors tamed, I’m able to get them subdued and looking more natural. More like how things actually look without garish saturated colors. I like that. But…
To me color is weaker. It just doesn’t have the hard-edged, gritty, badass sharp stick in the eye power of b/w, which to my mind can begin to convey the heart and spirit of the desert. This is a tough hard-edged place. Color can look nice but for me it falls short of what I try to do. It’s the nature of the beast.
I’ll use color, for a change of pace now and then if nothing else. I’m not rejecting it, but I do realize my true visual language is black and white. Know thyself…
I haven’t done much color for several years. I try it now and then, but I seldom like what I get so I abandon it. But that annoys me so I keep coming back to it.
I’m starting to appreciate it more. It can be good if you learn how to use it in your own way. I don’t know yet – maybe ’26 will be a year of more color. Stay tuned…
Double exposures can be interesting to experiment with. I’m not talking about the conventional kind that clutters Google photos – the ones of a face in profile with a tree growing out of the forehead or a cityscape blowing out of the top of the head. It’s easy to get gimmicky with it.
I’m talking about a basically straightforward shot with a hint of double ex. Used with restraint it can add another dimension to a photo. And there are more than three dimensions in the desert.
I have to be honest with myself. Color bores me, at least my color does. Sure it can look nice, but still…
Color can show what things look like out here in the desert, which is fine, but it doesn’t dig in to what it feels like. When I’m out in the desert as the sun starts to climb it feels like someone jabbed a sharp stick in my eye and then punched me in the gut. I can feel the roar of the sun as it climbs higher in the sky. That’s the feeling I try to get across, and I can at least hint at it with black and white. Color softens the blow too much.
Color can be a good change pace now and then. It’s fine for some things, and I’ll use it once in a while, but when it comes to evoking the true and fierce heart of the desert it simply doesn’t cut it for me.
desert topographics 