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.
18-JUN-2005
Niche, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2005
One of the most impressive buildings I saw on our quick tour through the streets of Leiden had a number of niches built into its façade. The sun was bouncing off a nearby canal and reflecting patterns of light into this particular niche. Incredibly, the reflected pattern of sunlight here repeated the X shape of the sails on the sculpted windmill in front of this niche. I photographed it several times in color, which emphasized the brown bricks and the tan niche. Those colors competed with the coincidental match of the reflected light pattern and the windmill. When I converted it to black and white, the image comes directly to the point – the repetition of those X’s.
14-JUN-2005
Castle of the Counts, Ghent, Belgium, 2005
Once the seat of the counts of Flanders, the ancient castle that dominates Ghent was built in the late 1100s. For three hundred years it was Ghent's military stronghold, and was later used as a city jail and a cotton mill. These ancient steps lead to the massive turrets that once guarded the city. To me, they were the essence of the castle. Framed in ancient stones, these fan-like steps are worn smooth from centuries of use. I carefully composed the image so that the doorway at upper right was reduced to a mere sliver of light and arranged that sliver within the frame so that it enters the image from the upper right hand corner and leads diagonally in to the steps – the only way in or out of this claustrophobic place. The original image featured brownish grout in the walls and gray-brown steps. When I converted this image to this crisp range of black and white tones, the image became simpler, cleaner, less real but more symbolic of another time. They were no longer tourist steps. They became castle steps that grasp the imagination and carry it back through the centuries.
16-JUN-2005
Silvius Brabo, Antwerp, Belgium, 2005
This is an abstract image of the eloquent figure at the top of the historic Brabo Fountain, a monument to Antwerp’s mythical hero, Silvius Brabo. Brabo supposedly drove off a giant that was demanding tolls from all ships that passed the port. Anyone who refused to pay had their hand chopped off by the giant, so Brabo took revenge by slicing off the ogre’s hand and throwing it into the Scheldt River. The town became known as Antwerp – which means, “hands throw” in Flemish. The statue depicts Brabo in the process of hurling the huge severed hand. Water spouts from its wrist. Brabo gives Antwerp its name with this legendary hand toss. I enjoyed relating the geometric form of the powerful sculpture to the stepped forms of the handsome old buildings that line Antwerp's town square behind it. In color, the statue appeared as oxidized green, and the buildings were dark brown. The sky is an overcast gray. I made it a much cleaner, more powerful image by converting it to this black and white abstraction. It becomes a study in pure shapes and geometric patterns, helping Brabo appear to dance along the rooftops of Antwerp.
11-JUN-2005
Michelangelo’s “Madonna and Child,” Bruges, Belgium, 2005
Michelangelo's marble statue "Madonna and Child" is the only one of his works to leave Italy during his lifetime. A Flemish merchant imported it and today it is sealed within a thick glass case deep in shadows of Bruges' Church of Our Lady. I used my telephoto lens at 388mm to zoom through that glass and make the figures pop out of the darkness, just as Michelangelo extracted them out the block of marble with his chisel. The figures seem ready to come to life. By underexposing and thereby abstracting this remarkable work of art, I show less of it and say more about it. This black and white conversion helps as well – when the marble color vanishes, they appear to look more like people and less like stone. And that was Michelangelo’s greatest gift – to make stone seem human.
14-JUN-2005
St. Baafskathedraal, Ghent, Belgium, 2005
The contrails of jet aircraft lace the sky over Ghent's gothic cathedral that was built during the middle ages. The great Flemish painter Jan van Eyck's remarkable 1432 "Adoration of the Mystic Lamb" is on display here, the first masterpiece ever to be painted with oils. By converting the sky from blue to black, I’ve made the dissolving contrail plumes seem less real and more symbolic as they diagonally crown the cathedral and the statue that stands in the plaza before it. They celebrate the splendor of this place, and salute the force of the sun as it emerges from behind the bell tower.
Closeup, Tad Fane Falls, Pakxong, Laos, 2005
This is one of those long, narrow waterfalls that has formed a crater in the middle of its drop. I used a 432mm telephoto lens to zoom in on that crater from across the valley. (You can see the entire waterfall in my Landscape Gallery by clicking on the thumbnail at the bottom.
Later, when looking at the color version of this image, I noticed that there really was not much color showing in my closeup picture at all. The backdrop for the water was in deep shadow. Only a few green trees barely showed in the picture. When I converted it to this black and white version, I honed the image down its very essence – the force of the water, as it flowed into the crater and the out of it again. The black and white version intensifies the crater's effect on the water's movement, and made this photograph much more expressive than it had been in color. (The color version of the entire waterfall, appearing in my landscape gallery, is a wideangle image embracing the view from across the valley. It works because of the way the light falls on the green’s, yellow’s and gold’s in the brilliantly colored foliage that embrace that scene and because of the foreground trees I added to that image.)
When I made my black and white conversion, I enriched the simplifying effect of the black shadows surrounding the falls by removing whatever traces of foliage lurked within them, and substantially abstracting the scene. I also increased the contrast and detail in the water as it smashed into and then flowed out of the crater, by playing with the different “channels” in the “channel mixer” selection box within Photoshop’s “Layers” palette.
This black and white image goes well beyond a travel photograph. Because it is now an abstraction, it becomes art-oriented image as well. It goes well beyond describing the appearance of Tad Fane Falls itself. It becomes a symbolic rendering of nature’s power, a much more universal statement. It is also becomes more mysterious in black and white – when coming upon this image, we might at first wonder exactly just what we are looking at. It almost resembles a fanciful X-ray picture made deep inside the human body. But it’s not – we are looking at my own impression of the massive authority of nature itself. It is up to the imagination of the viewer where it may go from there.
The Hard Work Begins Early, Salavan Province, Laos, 2005
I originally made this picture in color. The warm morning light and multi-colored garments of the young boy gave it a cheerful, almost festive feeling that conflicted with the physical effort involved in pushing a cart loaded with heavy bags of rice. I converted this picture to black and white, and the conflicting colors vanished, leaving us with an image of the timeless struggle to survive. From childhood on, these children learn what it means to work, and work hard.
This image is a good example of travel photojournalism, rather than travel photography. The difference comes in the approach to the picture. I am acting here as a visual reporter. I had no idea I even wanted to make this picture until I saw it happening before me. I was working on sheer instinct. Nothing was previsualized. I saw the cart coming at me, noticed that there were young children helping to push it, and kept shooting as it passed me. Because it is journalistic in nature, the black and white medium intensified its value as communication. The image becomes more direct, and more universal in terms of meaning. It could be anywhere in Asia, and the black and white form lets me imply it could have been made at any time in the last 30 years. It also becomes much simpler in form – gone are the vivid colors of the print design on the young boy’s sarong and yellow shirt. A red motorbike just behind the handles virtually vanishes in black and white. In color it was a prominent distraction.
Above all, the black and white rendering has removed the symbolic promise of a better day by removing the golden early morning light that bathed the scene in color. That warmly colored light is no longer a factor in meaning. Only the hard work is left.