On Monochrome
For the nearly ten years that I’ve been shooting I’ve shot 99.9% black and white images. Photography, for me, has been monochromatic. My introduction to photography was through landscape figures like Ansel Adams and John Sexton. When it came to making my own work the language of photography that I’d been to some degree indoctrinated in to was black and white. And beyond this pedagogic influence of “the masters” there was some kind of connection to black and white imagery that I did not experience in color work.
I’ve spoken about it here and there in different interviews but the gist of black and white for me is that it provides a certain degree of distance from our everyday experience of the world. In that gap between the familiar and the unfamiliar there is this space for uncanniness and for our reencountering of the world around us. Somewhere I’ve said that a color images calls to be viewed, while a black and white image calls to be contemplated.
Good Color Work and Episodic Experimentation
And yet, despite my deep roots in monochrome imagery there is some kind of allure to color images. I don’t find myself moved by a lot of color work but when it is done well it can be incredibly moving, even sparking the same kind of uncanny encounter that I describe black and white work doing so well, which is all the more amazing when we think that good color work manages to strike us in the medium of our everyday experience. On this note, I think this is why it’s hard to do well. Sure, we can make pretty photographs in color, ones that dazzle but which contain little beyond visual titillation.
One photographer who comes to mind here (in terms of creating moving color work that manages to be more than mere aesthetic masturbation) is Eliot Porter. Porter’s work is some of the few color photobooks I own. Between his unabashed compositions of the chaos and complexity of nature and his beautiful use of color, Porter’s imagery evokes a kind of mystical presencing of his subject matter, even in his work that is not strictly “nature” photography. For me personally Porter’s work and the capacity to express that kind of encounter with the subject in the medium of color is kind of the benchmark. That said, I’m also very much a complete pleb when it comes to color work so my familiarity with the realm of color photography is pretty dismal. I could very much use having my mind blown by other color photographers.
And so every couple of years, driven presumably by this unconscious draw, I get a wild hair to start shooting color images. Usually this infatuation lasts about one or two outings where I go out, make some color photos, come home and decide that they’re trash and just go back to my comfort zone and shoot black and white, resigning myself to the idea that color just isn’t for me before repeating the process again in another couples years. Some might call this insanity.
For some reason this time I felt more motivated to just keep shooting color, maybe as part of the broader urge to push my work in different directions, maybe out of an enjoyment of change and the challenge of trying to make interesting and compelling imagery in a different medium. Whatever the reason(s) I’ve been sticking to it and the process has been interesting.
The Language of Color
To maybe state the obvious, one of the things that I’ve realized is the trickiest part of making color work is developing a language of color, for lack of a better term. Color palette, tonalities, relationships of color in an image, etc etc. Not only during the act of shooting and seeing in terms of color imagery but during post-processing, when editing RAW files, there is a whole new layer of decision making and artistry involved.
To some degree black and white imagery is inherently less complex. At risk of being too simplistic, in monochrome one deals primarily with tones of gray and subjects. When I walk with a camera and I’m making images in black and white I’m looking at light, I’m looking at subjects, and for instances of the two coming together in ways that stop me and move me to make a picture.
When shooting with color imagery in mind I am still looking for light and subjects and the relationships created between the two but I’m also considering colors in the frame, the relationships between those colors, color contrasts, the temperature of the color, and, as said above, how I’m going to interpret that data captured by the camera during the processing phase to render what I initially saw in the final image.
This “language of color” is my biggest stumbling block, or maybe it’s better to say that it is what I’m currently working the most on figuring out. How I want to use color to express the things I wish to express in imagery. But, I am enjoying the process and seeing where it takes me. I have flashes of the kinds of imagery I’m looking to make in my mind, something that is able to blend some of the qualities of my black and white work with color. And I’ll continue to struggle my way to realizing those images. I’ll post another little gallery of some of the color work that I’ve made recently that I’ve liked or that I’ve felt is moving in the right direction. I don’t know if this is useful or helpful to anyone but my own desire to talk my way through this but nevertheless, I hope you’ve enjoyed it!
