07-JAN-2008
Flashback, Chau Doc, Vietnam, 2008
I spent about a half hour photographing street traffic from the fourth floor balcony of our hotel overlooking the central square of this town near the Vietnam/Cambodia border. Of all the images I made from that balcony, this one was the most memorable. He came out of the shadow of the tree like a phantom figure from the past, wearing a costume common in rural Vietnam fifty or 100 years ago. Yet there he was, balancing his wares on a single pole, abstracted by his conical hat, his shadow extending from his body like a ghost from another time. This image was a perfect candidate for black and white, an abstracting force that made the image less real, more ghostly and far more universally symbolic of a Vietnam that no longer exists.
31-DEC-2007
Cyclist at rest, Saigon, Vietnam, 2008
This woman must have been waiting for someone for a long time. Is she bored, tired, thoughtful, depressed, or all of the above? Her mask and gloves, intended to counter the ravages of bad air and to protect her skin from wind, sun, and dirt, shroud her in mystery. By converting the image to black and white, I was able to eliminate the color of her clothing and the tourist bus parked across the street, and make her into a symbolic representative of all the harried commuters who run the gauntlet of Saigon’s throbbing, roaring motorbike traffic twice every day.
16-JUL-2007
Bowl, Phoenix, Arizona, 2007
Something a simple as a fireplace ledge holding a small bowl can become a memorable image if textures are called into play. This image becomes a feast for the fingertips. We want to reach out and touch the bowl and the ledge on which it sits. The ledge is next to a floor to ceiling arched window in my living room. It only gets this kind of light for a few minutes each day. When I converted this image from color to black and white, it seems to move back into time. By removing the color we abstract the photograph down to its essence – the timeless interplay of light, shadow, texture, and form.
24-DEC-2006
Place Jemaa el-Fna, Marrakesh, Morocco, 2006
For centuries, this square has been the nerve center of Marrakesh and the symbol of the city. It has hardly changed. I made this photograph from the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the square, and converted it to black and white to stress the timelessness of the scene. Thousands of shoppers visit its markets, stalls, wagons, and shops by day. Outdoor restaurants are set up each evening, jugglers, dancers, and snake charmers perform, and the square echoes round the clock to the sound of North African music and throbbing drums. By reducing all of this to a black and white abstraction, such details are not seen, but left to the imagination. Note the flow of body language that carries us through the entire right center portion of the image – from bottom to top. It begins with the woman at center bottom carrying a large bundle on her back. Behind her, near the middle of the image, a man appears to be reaching for something. Behind him, a lone figure carries a tote bag. In the upper right hand portion of the image a motorbike drives away from the square towards distant carriages and individual strollers. The black and white rendering removes all detail, making these figures into abstract symbols of activity, and defining the essence of this square as Marrakesh’s central meeting place.
26-DEC-2006
Whitewash, Marrakesh, Morocco, 2006
This subject screamed for black and white as soon as I saw it. A man was up on a ladder, applying coats of white wash to an ancient arch – an entrance to the souks in Marrakesh’s old city. The black and white medium compliments the very nature of both task and setting – the gleaming white arch and the dark black shadows of its interior are utterly without color. I abstract the painter himself in the process. His sweater and skin tones become as monochromatic as his subject.
27-SEP-2006
Firehole Falls, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 2006
Yellowstone’s scenery originates in its volcanic past. The center of the park is a vast caldera, the residue of volcanic eruptions. Yellowstone has erupted three times over the past two million years. The most recent eruption, about 650,000 years ago, created Firehole Falls near the northern rim of its caldera. The Falls surge over giant lava rocks, a perfect subject for a monochromatic image. I used a fast shutter speed of 1/500th of a second to freeze the churning water into lacy threads of frothy bubbles. The black and white rendering makes the image timeless, which is appropriate to Firehole Falls, itself a product of time.
07-AUG-2006
Billboard, Houston Street, New York City, 2006
The face shouting at us through a mass of trees comes from a huge black and white billboard. The leaves, photographed with back lighting, were black. The only color in the scene was a bit of green translucence on the edges of some of the leaves – color that added nothing to the image. When I converted it to black and white, the image became unified and coherent. The shout becomes even more surreal when the reality of color yields to the abstraction of black and white.
27-MAR-2006
Cemetery, Taketomi Island, Okinawa, Japan, 2006
Taketomi is a small island, a ferry ride away from the city of Ishigaki, the southernmost city of Japan. Taketomi gave me my only sense of rural Japan. I photographed this gray granite tomb on a gray day -- a perfect reason for a black and white image. The conversion to black and white simplified the image by removing the only trace of life – the green branches in the trees at upper right. It reduced the image to contrasting tones of granite –- the light pagoda in the foreground and the black tomb behind and around it. The grave itself is in the wall just behind the pagoda, which appears here as a yawning black opening. The tomb is actually sealed, but to many it symbolizes the death that awaits us all.
11-FEB-2006
Back to the 50s at the Bagdad Café, Newberry Springs, California, 2006
While visiting this legendary roadhouse along old route US 66, I made images in both color and black and white to study the difference in both effect and meaning. This café served as the location for 1988 German film that has become a cult classic, and it continues to draw European tourists visiting the Mohave Desert. The café staff is used to cameras by now – in fact, I shared breakfast here with 19 fellow photographers participating in Route 66 Image Quest workshop led by pbase artist Dave Wyman and Ken Rockwell. ( See:
http://home.comcast.net/~wymanburke/Route66.html )
I spent very little time eating at the cafe, and a lot of time shooting its interior and exterior with two cameras. I used my Panasonic FZ-30 for color travel photos (click on thumbnail below ) and a Leica D-Lux 2 for a black and white photojournalistic approach. I appreciated my color images for what color had to say, and I savored the black and white images for taking me back to the 50s again. This photojournalistic image could have easily been made here in the 50s (except for that beer, which would not have cost $3.00, and smoking would have been more welcome. Needless to say, I would have shot it with tri-x film.) We tend to recall our own past through the pictures we have made and seen, and photos of the 50s probably looked very much like this one.
26-OCT-2005
Threes, Guanajuato, Mexico, 2005
I built this image around the presence of three posts and three people. The posts are linked by chains and rigidly aligned. The people are free to go their own way in their own time. I shot the image at mid-day, using backlighting to abstract both the posts and the people. The more abstract this image becomes, the more the posts and people function as symbol, rather than description. Black and white imaging will always increase the degree of abstraction by removing the nuance and meaning of color. Just as backlighting hones this image down to the bone, so too, does monochrome.
08-SEP-2005
Cornice heads, Cathedral of St. James, Sibenik, Croatia, 2005
The most memorable feature of this cathedral is a strikingly incongruous array of 71 human heads extending from the building’s cornice, all of them representing not heroes or saints or biblical figures, but instead every day 16th century people. No two are alike.
I chose to include only seven of them in this image, concentrating on the spot where two cornices joined at right angles to each other. I placed the top head in the upper left hand corner and let them flow from there down to the lower right hand corner. But one thing bothered me – the peachy tone of the church itself. The faces are gritty and intense, but the church’s exterior seemed pleasant and soft to the touch. When I converted this image to black and white, the peach colored tone vanished, and the faces no long had to compete with it. They now stare at each other with all the ferocity they can muster.
11-JUN-2005
Stadhuis, Bruges, Belgium, 2005
One of the oldest and finest town halls in Belgium, Bruges’ Stadhuis was built between 1376 and 1420. I am not interested in making postcard views of historic buildings. Instead I try to express their essence. For me, this building was steeped in history and grandeur. To say it was impressive would be an understatement. I took many photos of it during my two day stay in Bruges, but none of them expressed its character as much as this one. It took an act of nature to help me accomplish this goal. It was early morning, and the sun was just coming up behind the clouds. I positioned the sun behind one of the elegant statues that crown the building, and was awed by billowing backlit translucent streams of clouds exploding from that very point in the picture. In color, the sky was a deep blue, and there was a tinge of reflective coloration in the clouds as well. It was beautiful to look at, but it made the scene look too real. When I converted it to black and white, reality is replaced by symbolism – the clouds represent power and mystery, two of the qualities I sensed in the building itself. So black and white it is. It was worth visiting Bruges for just this moment.
