Why Black and White Still Feels Like Home
How My Love of Black and White Photography Began
Long before digital cameras, Lightroom presets, and endless memory cards, I was an eight-year-old kid with a Kodak Holiday Flash camera and a fledgling interest in photographs.
Black and white wasn’t an artistic choice at first. It was simply what we could afford. Film was cheaper, which meant I could shoot more of it.
What began as a practical necessity soon became something much more. A few years later, standing in my junior high school darkroom, I watched an image slowly emerge in a tray of developer. It felt like magic. In that moment I was hooked, and in many ways I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.
Over the years I photographed yearbooks, studied photojournalism, built darkrooms, opened a commercial studio, and made thousands of photographs in both color and black and white. Yet after all these years—and despite the remarkable capabilities of modern digital photography—I still find myself drawn back to monochrome.
Why?
Because it continues to reveal photographs I might otherwise miss.
It strips away one layer of information and allows light, shadow, form, texture, and emotion to carry the story. It feels less tied to a particular moment in time and more connected to something enduring. A strong black and white photograph made today can feel every bit as relevant thirty years from now.
Perhaps that’s why I continue to return to it. Black and white photography is where I began, but more importantly, it’s still where I most often find the photographs that speak to me.
The Beginning...
After having been allowed on the floor of a Ft. Wayne Pistons NBA game at age 8 to photograph it with that original camera, we were pleasantly surprised to find that the pictures had indeed “come out.”
By the time I was in Junior High School, I went to a basketball game armed with my new Brownie Super 27 camera.
Someone on the yearbook staff saw me and told Jim Newcomber, who was the Dean of Men but also the yearbook advisor. Once he took me in the school darkroom, and I saw an image appear as if by magic in the developer tray, I was hooked.
This is my first published photo, an image from that night at the Junior High basketball game that ended up in the yearbook:
That photograph led to seven years of shooting for school yearbooks, first in junior high and then in high school. Most of that work was done in black and white because I could process and print it myself in the darkroom we built in our basement.
By the time I arrived at The University of Texas to study photojournalism, black and white had become second nature. Later, when I opened my studio in Houston, a darkroom was as essential as a camera. Although much of my commercial work was shot in color, I continued to photograph extensively in black and white.
Learning to See in Black and White
In fact, there were assignments where clients wanted both versions. That wasn’t as simple as flipping a switch or applying a preset. It meant carrying different film, making different exposure decisions, and often approaching the same subject in two entirely different ways.
“Seeing” in black and white is different than looking at things with an eye to delivering results in color.
With color photography, color itself is sometimes the subject. The interplay between colors can create visual impact, establish mood, or, in commercial photography, simply ensure that a client’s brand colors are rendered accurately.
Shooting in black and white forces one to think more carefully about light, shadow, and structure, since you can't rely on color to make an image pop. That constraint breeds much more intentionality in composing the image.
Light, Form, and Texture
For me, the appeal of black and white has always been that it asks us to see differently. Color can sometimes become the subject of a photograph, but black and white strips away that layer and leaves light, shadow, form, texture, and expression to carry the story.
Perhaps most importantly, black and white demands discipline. Without color to draw the eye, composition becomes paramount. The photographer has to pay closer attention to structure, relationships, and the way light shapes a scene. That constraint often leads to more thoughtful photographs.
And it also ages well; while a color photo from 30 years ago might indeed look dated, a black and white is much more likely to feel classic.
In the end, people like it because it feels more deliberate, like a choice was made to see something more carefully, and many times that reads as art.
Zurich: A Day That Changed My Perspective
In my Zurich collection, I recount how my initial plan to spend my free day shooting color on the streets of that Swiss city was undone by the flat, grey atmosphere of the winter day. Instinctively, I started ‘seeing’ in black and white
And since this was in the days of film, luckily I had come prepared and had a good supply of black and white in my bag. So while I arrived intending to shoot color, I spent the day shooting black and white instead.
I honestly began seeing the potential images as black and white compositions, possibly made easier by the fact that it was a pretty grey day to begin with.
And it got easier as the day wore on. Once I settled into that mindset, I stopped looking for color and began looking for shape, tone, and gesture instead. The city hadn’t changed, but the way I was seeing it had.
The Zurich Collection bears that out.
Finding Black and White Images Hidden in Color
So what do we do today, when everything is shot digitally, and hence originally in color?
Well of course we can hark back to the lessons of Ansel Adams and pre-visualize; that is, do the same thing I did in Zurich—‘see’ in black and white.
And head in that direction when processing the image.
One of my favorite images, Holm Island, “Sound of Raasay, Isle of Skye” is a case in point.
As I saw the scene before me, and set up my camera on the tripod, I KNEW that this image was going to be rendered in tones of black and white. It was such a grey, monochromatic scene it was pretty much a no brainer.
The basic composition seems to present itself, although I do have a few variations of the cropping, made all the more difficult by the strong wind blasting against my 70-200mm lens, so much so that I had to hang my backpack from the tripod to add some stability to the setup.
And bringing out the image I saw in my mind when shooting proved to be the perfect direction for presenting the image to the world. As witnessed by the multiple exhibitions it has been in to date. The finished print looked almost exactly as I had imagined it standing on that windswept hillside.
But in addition to that, as I have stated before, “Sometimes the photograph waits patiently until we are ready to see it…”
In that vein, I have been revisiting some images that have been in the catalog for varying periods of time, and in many cases have sen them with ‘fresh eyes,’ eyes that realize that the color image I am looking at is in reality hiding a much more impressive black and white scene.
There is always something that caught my eye, something that compelled me to grab a frame, or two or three. Sometimes it takes revisiting that scene via the captured image to really ‘see’ what it was that I was drawn to, and many times it seems that what is lurking in the file is a black and white image. So I find myself being drawn back to where things started for me, letting the impression of the final image make itself known.
Another example here, an image that started out in color. But the more I looked at it, I realized there was a black and white image waiting to be discovered.
It drove home something I have repeated before: Sometimes the photograph waits patiently until we are ready to see it.
Why Black and White Still Feels Like Home
Over the years I have learned that photographs often reveal themselves slowly. Sometimes the image that first caught my attention isn’t fully apparent until years later, when I return to the file with fresh eyes.
Perhaps that’s why I continue to be drawn to black and white. It isn’t simply nostalgia, nor is it a rejection of color. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that some photographs seem to speak more clearly when stripped down to their essentials.
Black and white is where my photographic journey began more than sixty years ago. And after all this time, it remains one of the most powerful ways I know to interpret the world around me.