Black and White

There is something that happens when you strip color out of a photograph. Everything that color was doing — catching your eye, competing for attention, telling you what to feel — disappears, and what's left has to stand on its own. Texture. Light. Shadow. Shape. The bones of the image. Black and white photography has been around as long as photography itself, and it's never lost its power, because those are the things that actually make a great photograph, and in monochrome there's nowhere to hide.

The images in this collection come from a lot of different places and a lot of different moods — the rugged sea stacks of Luffenholtz Beach, the cathedral-like quiet of the Del Norte redwoods, the haunting interior of an abandoned cabin, a church in Oslo, a person walking their dog on a foggy morning. Some of these started as color photographs that I knew the moment I made them were really black and white images waiting to happen. Others were conceived in monochrome from the start. Either way, these are the images where I felt the color would have gotten in the way of the story — and the story was too good to let that happen.