Why Black and White?
Since the beginning of thinking philosophers, mathematicians, religious and other perplexed individuals have sought a universal denominator to reconcile the disparate elements of the world, to create relationships in equal or similar terms. In discovering this common factor they hoped to create a continuous scale of values and from that build a cohesive and general meaning.
"Black and White" photography achieves this visually by the accident of its process, by using the continuous gray scale that marks the sensitivity of silver to light. All the elements of the image fall within this unified range of tonality and can create a powerful, self-referential statement with a more integrated logic than color. Like the string quartet in classical music it uses austere means to build an organic, hermetic and compelling "reality" that speaks as much to our minds as to our senses. Like a dream state or mathematical proof it convinces by the direct appeal of its purity of context and means.
Why I Prefer the Normal Lens
Photography has the unique capability in the visual arts of being invisible in its artifice. Even in its most extreme forms the information it can convey is usually accepted without question and reacted to directly. If not necessarily "reality" it does reflect facts before a lens.
I feel a photograph must immediately evince a recognition of "reality" (see below) using a set of visual cues and information. The normal lens, whose focal length mimics the human field of view and perspective rarely introduces its artifice to the viewer. For me it is important to hide the process and my presence in it: images made with wide or telephoto lenses often undermine that. If there is any authenticity to my work I would attribute it to the challenge and directness of approach required by the normal lens. Like life you must physically engage with the subject to fill the frame. It took practice and occasionally guts. I believe the viewer shares that involvement unconsciously and viscerally.
Reality
When I first got involved in photography (1980) almost everyone (amateurs and fine artists) worked in "black and white" due to the technical limitations of "color," its chemistry being complex and non-archival. Some of us did better than others in "seeing" and appreciating black and white and a few, myself included, realized its special power and continued working in it when color became the accepted default representation. A few years later digital tools solved color's difficulties and the aesthetic issues seemed irrelevant. Photography was about reality (or a manipulation or editorial thereof) and reality was in color, wasn't it? Case closed. Or was it?
To maintain that what the human eye sees, i.e., those electromagnetic wavelengths frequencies x to y merit some special place in the "reality" business is naive and chauvinistic. The quicker one disabuses one of that point of view the better. Most of human arts and communication bears no resemblance to a two-dimensional record of colors and shapes. I understand that insects see a flower in other wavelengths than human vision and that a spider's web simulates what an insect sees: thus the trap of using one's own tools as the key to "reality."
"At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor…
We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander."
Henry David Thoreau
Writer, Philosopher, Surveyor
Not static and with an ambiguous often unknowable narrative the visual world can nevertheless be recorded with a camera. Chance, chaos, co-incidence, the strict logic of reflected light, the sheer particularity of objects, I encounter these elements before me and within the frame of my lens. I respond within and outside the limits of my instrument which has certain capabilities beyond my own. This entanglement and asymmetrical relationship often results in unexpected and rewarding results, simultaneous events and associations, dissonances and harmonies far greater than expected, anticipated or imaginable. For this reason I continue to go out into the field.
Thomas Rozakis
2020
Since the beginning of thinking philosophers, mathematicians, religious and other perplexed individuals have sought a universal denominator to reconcile the disparate elements of the world, to create relationships in equal or similar terms. In discovering this common factor they hoped to create a continuous scale of values and from that build a cohesive and general meaning.
"Black and White" photography achieves this visually by the accident of its process, by using the continuous gray scale that marks the sensitivity of silver to light. All the elements of the image fall within this unified range of tonality and can create a powerful, self-referential statement with a more integrated logic than color. Like the string quartet in classical music it uses austere means to build an organic, hermetic and compelling "reality" that speaks as much to our minds as to our senses. Like a dream state or mathematical proof it convinces by the direct appeal of its purity of context and means.
Why I Prefer the Normal Lens
Photography has the unique capability in the visual arts of being invisible in its artifice. Even in its most extreme forms the information it can convey is usually accepted without question and reacted to directly. If not necessarily "reality" it does reflect facts before a lens.
I feel a photograph must immediately evince a recognition of "reality" (see below) using a set of visual cues and information. The normal lens, whose focal length mimics the human field of view and perspective rarely introduces its artifice to the viewer. For me it is important to hide the process and my presence in it: images made with wide or telephoto lenses often undermine that. If there is any authenticity to my work I would attribute it to the challenge and directness of approach required by the normal lens. Like life you must physically engage with the subject to fill the frame. It took practice and occasionally guts. I believe the viewer shares that involvement unconsciously and viscerally.
Reality
When I first got involved in photography (1980) almost everyone (amateurs and fine artists) worked in "black and white" due to the technical limitations of "color," its chemistry being complex and non-archival. Some of us did better than others in "seeing" and appreciating black and white and a few, myself included, realized its special power and continued working in it when color became the accepted default representation. A few years later digital tools solved color's difficulties and the aesthetic issues seemed irrelevant. Photography was about reality (or a manipulation or editorial thereof) and reality was in color, wasn't it? Case closed. Or was it?
To maintain that what the human eye sees, i.e., those electromagnetic wavelengths frequencies x to y merit some special place in the "reality" business is naive and chauvinistic. The quicker one disabuses one of that point of view the better. Most of human arts and communication bears no resemblance to a two-dimensional record of colors and shapes. I understand that insects see a flower in other wavelengths than human vision and that a spider's web simulates what an insect sees: thus the trap of using one's own tools as the key to "reality."
"At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor…
We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander."
Henry David Thoreau
Writer, Philosopher, Surveyor
Not static and with an ambiguous often unknowable narrative the visual world can nevertheless be recorded with a camera. Chance, chaos, co-incidence, the strict logic of reflected light, the sheer particularity of objects, I encounter these elements before me and within the frame of my lens. I respond within and outside the limits of my instrument which has certain capabilities beyond my own. This entanglement and asymmetrical relationship often results in unexpected and rewarding results, simultaneous events and associations, dissonances and harmonies far greater than expected, anticipated or imaginable. For this reason I continue to go out into the field.
Thomas Rozakis
2020