Category: thoughts

To my mind you never ‘arrive’ when it comes to photography. You’re always moving in one direction or another – sometimes forward, sometimes back, sometimes you take a circuitous sidetrack that leaves you wondering what the hell that was.

I think the most important thing is to work with the attitude ‘what if…’. You try things to find out. If it doesn’t work you’ll know it. If it has possibilities you’ll know that too. It’s all practice.

Recently I gave color another shot for several days. It’s okay, looks pretty good, there’s nothing wrong with it. But to me something vital is lacking in my color shots and I realize that black and white is my language. (I prefer to call it black and white rather than monochrome or grayscale. Old school I guess).

Why? Let’s say you sat a scientist, maybe a biologist or botanist, down in front of a dead desert ironwood alongside someone like Jim Harrison and asked each to write a short paragraph or poem about it. From the scientist you’d likely get an accurate description. Literal. Scientific. Factual. A scientific fact. But probably pretty dry. From Harrison you’d get a poem. An expression of soul. Of feeling. Of spirit and mystery. To me this is the big difference between color and black and white. Fact vs. feeling.

For me a worthwhile photo points to what Robert Adams called a mystery greater than our failures. Color, at least in my hands, is factual, doesn’t point to that mystery. It doesn’t have that feeling, that soul. It’s too literal. It falls short. Black and white can if done well. That, the doing it well, is the challenge.