Black & White Photography

For me, black and white is the fastest way I know to find out whether I actually saw something. Black and white were also photography's first colours, and for most of its first century all it had, so everything a photograph is built on was worked out without colour and still works without it. It also puts a picture outside of time. People place a monochrome frame further back than a colour one of the same scene, so a photograph from a hundred years ago and one from last week hang together easily.

Colour describes and black and white interprets, so a monochrome frame is already a reading of the scene. Shape takes a moment where colour lands on you straight away, which is why a black and white picture asks a little more of whoever is looking at it. In black and white a portrait is about the person. The camera also ends up teaching you to see without it, in light and shadow, and a photograph is made in that looking long before it's taken.

What follows is a small archive of the frames I've kept, and some writing about the pictures and how they get made.