Fire & Ice: Transforming destruction
Shooting in black and white makes the forest damage seem less tragic and more abstract and beautiful
Yes, I’ve still got Ripley on my mind, and as a result I’ve been shooting a lot more black and white than usual these days. This is by no means a sudden affectation. When I first took up photography as a kid, it was black and white film that went into the Kodak box camera I’d found abandoned in the hall closet. Color film was too expensive in our family.
Years later, as I became more seriously mesmerized by taking pictures, it was black and white all the way. Like a lot of aspiring photographers of my generation, when I was in college I learned to shoot 35mm Tri-X and develop it in Rodinal, a developer that Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer notes is generally terrible in less than skilled hands, as “most pictures will be overlaid with a fog of depression and despair.”
If course, when I was in college, I was kind of into fogs of despair, so I didn’t need that much skill to enjoy the look it gave.
When I returned to photography as an adult, it was with black and white film, as bulk Tri-X was much more affordable than color slides, and I was shooting a lot with film in an old Pentax LX. I built a darkroom in the utility shed at home and spent years processing hundreds of rolls of Tri-X in, yes, Rodinal. A little fog of despair lends just the right amount of grit to a photo destined for hand coloring.
Of course, then the digital age arrived. It was 2006 when I bought my first serious digital camera, a used Canon 20D. It was wonderful to shoot to my heart’s content without thinking about how much money I was spending every time I pressed the shutter. I told myself I would get back to the darkroom someday, but never did, and finally last year I gave the enlarger and accessories and a pile of unused photo paper to a community darkroom in Eugene.
So where does that leave black and white photography? In flux, and I think that’s for the better. A lot of photographers who post online have been trying, mostly in vain, to capture digitally the look of a well exposed, well processed film negative printed on good paper by a darkroom genius. For the most part, they don’t even come close.
This reminds me of John Brombaugh, a now retired builder of fine pipe organs whose shop was in Eugene. John fell in love with pipe organ music and so was studying electrical engineering in college because he wanted to build an instrument that could make that sound electronically. After several years of working on the problem, he realized the easiest way to get the sound of a pipe organ was simply to build one. Brombaugh organs — he built 67 in his career — are now in churches, cathedrals and theaters around the world. They don’t require electricity to play, and can be built with techniques that would have been familiar to 16th century craftsmen.
OK, back to digital black and white. Yes, you can emulate film — but it makes a lot more sense to me simply to shoot film if that’s the look you want. But why not use the flexibility of digital photography and processing to create a new black and white with its own look?
Ripley, for example, was shot in digital but doesn’t aspire to look like black and white film. It has a brilliant, assertive look of its own that left me wanting to watch the whole seven-hour series from the beginning the minute we finished the final episode. I’m not sure I could have stayed with it that long if it had been shot on film.
These black and white images of damaged trees in our woods I took this morning are not brilliant, but they’re a start on something — a step toward creating an entire process, from shooting the photos to printing and then hand coloring them.
Here’s a picture from earlier in the spring that I’ve printed and have been working on with color. It clearly needs more work — getting control of the color of wood, say — but I like the photo and like the color possibilities contrasting the freshly broken wood with the rest of the forest duff.
Soon I’ll figure all this out and establish a look and a process I want to use in Fire & Ice, an exhibit that will be shown next year of climate-change damage done to the forests of Oregon. Stay tuned….
i just got back from a carbon printing workshop in Yosemite, where I shot in color but mainly bw. there are a coupke of local photographers locally who are documenting fire damage through artistic photography. perhaps you already know David Bayles who has a photo book Urban Foresy
Hmm. Hand-colored, you say. But then, presumably photographed digitally (again) for digital presentation in the post to which I am replying. I would be sorely tempted to try coloring digitally so that the images could be presented in their native format. And, given that, to address the coloration more to the composition and message than to fidelity. … or to do both and present them as image pairs. You are on an interesting trip.