My War With Color

   In 1978 when I was 9 years old my father put one of his Minolta SRT101 cameras in my hand because I kept asking him to use it. I was disappointed when he told me there was color film loaded and not black and white. I spent many hours looking through his boxes of black and white prints in awe of what could happen in the darkroom. I remember asking why I couldn’t use the camera with the Tri-X in it and he explained that I had to learn to correctly expose film and there was no better way than with Kodachrome. For almost 6 months I was stuck using this color stuff before I was given permission to load the Kodak b&w film that was sitting on my shelf taunting me.

   Being that young I guess I didn’t appreciate the beauty of Kodachrome, and hey I could always use it again because it will be around forever, right. As I entered high school I took a photography course but my only interest was in black and white photography and it’s one of the few things I actually liked about school but then in the middle of the year my photography teacher was killed which ended the course. Things didn’t get any better the next year. My parents got divorced and shortly after my father died and I ended up putting my camera in a drawer for several years and I destroyed all my negatives and prints. A few years later thousands of my father’s slides, negatives and prints were destroyed in a flooded basement. I still think about all those black and white prints.

   I returned to photography a few times in my 20s but other aspects of my life kept getting in the way and as before I ended up destroying my work, but in my early 30s I decided to pursue it full time. I picked up my dad’s Minolta and whatever black and white film that I could get my hands on and at this point I still had no interest in color photography. Not even after I bought one of those new fancy digital cameras. Something did change.

   As the world around me became less colorful and more beige, white, grey and black I began to understand the need for color photography, something that hit me hard after looking through my old digital files that were in color. Gone were the neons, the reds, the yellows, the blues; every color in the rainbow. Since then I’ve tried to use color for a few projects but it never seemed to work out for most but there were two that began as black and white that I have since re-edited the RAW photos in color. But even that wasn’t enough for me to switch for good be because my mind is fixated on light and shadow, not color and after a while it becomes confusing for me.

  Every once in a while nostalgia takes a hold of me when I see an old black and white photo and wish it was in those beautiful Kodachrome colors so I can remember that tomato red paint and taxi cab yellow paint that was used all around the city. The color of the cars and clothes, the advertisements, and even the garbage. BUT…even after all this I’m still drawn back to black and white.

  My thoughts on continuing photography as I age has me thinking of simplifying my process and thoughts of giving up color all together keeps rearing its head. Well, besides the Bob’s Diner color snapshots. The release of three monochrome only cameras could make that a reality if it wasn’t for their prices. Even so, the idea of only having to see in black and white excites me and I’m hoping to make it a reality in the next year or two.