Restraints, constraints, barriers, and limitations.
Its 4 am on Sunday morning, the time that Field Notes is normally published. Yet, I find myself typing out words at the computer, trying to form an essay. Between arriving back from a week long vacation yesterday afternoon and leaving in a couple of hours to take my daughter to the big city for a volleyball clinic today, time has been a constraint. Opportunity and space to write has been a limitation.
We face innumerable restraints on our freedom to do what we’d like when we’d like in life. This always presents a fundamental choice. We can skip the thing, because the factors lining up against it are too great, or we can do the best we can within the limitations we are presented with. Sometimes option A is the right call.
However, it is my experience that often times the pressure of working within tight parameters and limits can bring out a surprising level of creativity. Not having enough time may be the driving factor for getting the thing done at all. Not having everything that is needed calls forth remarkable resourcefulness.
Working within the limits life imposes upon us becomes an art form of balance and ingenuity within our lived experiences. With that in mind, some self-imposed limitations to our creative efforts can hone our skills, train new pathways of thinking, seeing, and feeling. Stanza, meter, and rhyme limit words, yet give form to a poem. A personal essay in which one does not refer to oneself is a challenge, but demands imaginative sentence and paragraph structure.
Many of you have seen my contributions to Substack Notes over the past couple of weeks and know of my recent efforts with Black & White photography. Personally, this is a huge limitation. I have always had a very strong preference for color as a method of conveying emotion through a visual medium. And it is precisely because I rely on it so heavily that I decided to try removing it from my images.
Black & White photography is my experiment. It is forcing me to look at the world with new eyes- seeing tonality in light, recognizing texture. The emotion may still be present, but seems to arise from association, context, and memory. These images convey tactile sensation and mental conception through the play of shadow, light, and the entire scale of gray in between.
So today I offer you a series of Black & White photos. You may have seen many of these before, and I will link to some of the posts in Notes, for the many of you receiving Field Notes who are unfamiliar with that platform. I am also sharing many of the same photos directly, in the hopes that they appear somehow larger, more detailed, or higher quality in this format. As always, this may not translate if you are reading this on a phone and I encourage you to take a look at this essay on a computer.
This experiment in Black & White started during a normal week. I photographed pets and simple flowers at sunrise, blooming along a roadside. These were made with the additional limitation of being taken with my iPhone. The work continued while in the Smoky Mountains this past week, and while I took these with a DSLR camera I was still away from my computer and processed them on an app in my down time. Some of these mountain and stream views are shared here for the first time.
You may notice the grain in the larger versions of these photos. That is an intentional element I added to them in processing. Another experiment, an attempt at lending them a classic, perhaps senescent look.
On to the Great Smoky Mountains!
Don’t worry guys, I won’t stick with Black & White photos forever. In fact, I plan to re-work several of these photos in color soon. My family vacation to the Smokies presented some REALLY interesting encounters and photo opportunities which I hope to present next week. Stay tuned!
Till then, let’s talk about Black & White! What do you think?
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