Why black and white at all?

I work in black and white because color is a decision about mood, and black and white is a decision about structure — and the American West is structural. This is the longer version of that argument.

I've been making monochrome photographs for twenty years. The question I get asked most often isn't how or where; it's why. Why commit to a medium most photographers treat as a stylistic detour? Why the camera, the meter, the darkroom, the prints, for something you could simulate in post in thirty seconds? The short answer is that it isn't a style. It's a way of seeing. The longer answer is below.

When I started shooting seriously at sixteen, I was making the same photographs everyone makes. Color landscapes. Sunsets. The usual catalog. I was competent and uninteresting, and I was uninteresting in the way most photography becomes uninteresting: I was recording rather than selecting.

The turn happened on one of my early Zion trips. I'd been going back most years by then, and the photographs were all the same: red sandstone, blue sky, a stand of cottonwoods in whatever golden-hour light I could find. They were postcards. I'd seen better ones — a thousand of them — in every gift shop in the state. Technically fine, but why? The only answer was that I'd been there. That's not a reason.

Somewhere in that trip, almost as an experiment, I swapped to black and white for the afternoon. I was expecting nothing. What I got was a frame of a single canyon wall — no sky, no trees, no obvious subject — that held me the way the color frames hadn't. The wall was doing something: a weight, a geometry, a presence that the color had been papering over. I was looking at structure for the first time. That was the break.

What happens in a photograph when you remove color is hard to describe until you've done it. The easiest way to put it is that color tells the viewer where to look, and monochrome tells the viewer how to look. In color, the eye goes to saturation first, then to contrast, then — maybe — to composition. In black and white, there's nothing to go to first except the structure: light, shadow, shape, the way a plane of rock meets a plane of sky. Nothing is shouting, so everything is listening.

This matters more in some places than others. The American West is structural in a way much of the country isn't. A maple forest in fall is a color story; there's no version of it in monochrome that isn't a translation. But Zion, the canyon country, the salt flats, the granite walls — these are places that live in form. The color is decorative; the form is the subject. When you photograph them in color, you're describing a place. When you photograph them in black and white, you're arguing about what it is.

Three examples from my own archive. A frame on Mount Rainier, early winter, the mountain half-covered in fog: in color it was a postcard of snow and rock; in monochrome it became a negotiation between solid and vapor, with the rock finally losing. A long exposure at Bonneville: the salt in color is white-ish blue-ish, pretty and forgettable; in black and white it became a geometric plane, and the distant mountains became propositions rather than details. Yosemite granite under raking mid-morning light: in color the rock flattened into a texture, but monochrome brought the scale back — the same scale Ansel Adams saw, which is the only reason anyone keeps going back.

That's what black and white does. It isn't that color is wrong. It's that color is a different conversation, and most of the time, for the kind of landscape that brings me back to the West, the conversation I want to have is in monochrome.

I still shoot color.

Not often — maybe one frame in a hundred makes it to a final color print — but I carry color film, and I shoot color digital alongside the monochrome work. The reason is that dogma is how photography goes stale. The moment you stop asking which medium is right for this frame, and start asking which medium fits the practice, you've traded looking for branding. Some frames belong to color. A stand of aspen on a cold October morning when the leaves are doing their impossible thing. A salt flat at dusk when the last band of orange is sitting on the horizon like a strip of painted tape. The one in a hundred where color is the subject, not the surface. Those frames stay color. They earn it.

Twenty years in, I still think about why.

The practical reasons are real — tonal range, archival longevity, the physical print — but those are secondary. The real reason is that black and white keeps forcing me to see. Color is comfortable. Monochrome strips out the easy signal and leaves the harder one: what is this place actually made of? That question is the one I'm out there to answer, and black and white is the only medium I've found that keeps asking it.

So: why black and white? Because I'd rather make one photograph that's about something than a hundred that are about color. Because the American West rewards the kind of looking that only monochrome demands. And because, in the end, the quiet photographs are the ones you live with.

That's enough to go on.