I don’t know what it is about winter that makes me break out my rolls of black and white film. Maybe it’s the occasional blanket of snow that falls on the landscape, or the stark lines that the branches create… whatever the reason, I have broke the color train and shifted gears to Ilford 400 for this series. I shot the flint hills and the interiors during the weekend of Christmas and the rest were taken after a major snowfall here in the Midwest.
While I was scanning these images in, I was listening to the podcast Kodakery where they interviewed photographer Jeff Johnson. About half way through he brought up a really interesting thought.
“Nothing is black and white except for film, except for photography…literally nothing in this world is black and white….the thing about photography is that it’s not reality, you’re projecting an image of reality, to do color you’re trying to say that this is reality.”
HIs thought was centered around the draw of black and white imagery in the world. He briefly took the point that there are necessities and unique attributes to both color and b&w but that film photography is the only thing in the world that is innately absent of color. I asked some friends what they thought of this idea and some drew a parallel between reading a book and watching a movie.
“When I look at this black and white image I am forced to imagine what colors, characters and place it is in. Similar to reading a book. I can sit there and imagine what the characters look like and the place that they inhabit; but to watch the movie afterwards, that imaginative world that I created in my head is almost taken away from me and replaced with someone else’s.”
They are all shot on my Yashica A 6 by 6 medium format camera.
