BLACK & WHITE

After a hard day exploring the intensely colorful murals of bustling Wynnewood Walls in Miami, my brain needed coffee, my ears silence, my legs a chair, and my eyes the color white - each need clamoring for priority. For those reasons, we wandered off the main drag and there it was – a white building with a mostly white sign advertising white milk. At last, peace, quiet, purity - the qualities of white. 

White is a blend of all colors. Black, its complementary, is a non-color since it absorbs all colors. The qualities of black include sophistication, elegance, wealth, and power. I photograph both colors singly and together. 

Traditional black and white photography excludes all color and is marvelous for evoking mood and capturing emotion, so I use it to highlight nostalgia, isolation, fear, grief, depression. The late photographer David Heath was a master of this and his retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art had me riveted.  I returned four times, each time dazzled by the brilliant shades of black in his prints. I wonder if children of today, like Barbie, raised from birth in supersaturated color, will ever fully appreciate these black and white prints. 

All of the images in this section are conversions from the original color. Some were done to fool the eye. They are not vintage unless you consider me vintage.