When Black and White Was Easy
As a teenager, I would walk through the mall at Christmas time and see the temporary booths set up to sell calendars. Year after year, I would see the same calendar with different photographs shown. One in particular stood out: Ansel Adams.
His calendar stood out because I thought, “Anyone could do that. Why does he have calendars all the time? Why is he famous?”
I didn’t know. I thought black and white film made black and white photographs.
All I knew was it was the same old thing repackaged for a new year. Same with the Audubon Society, cars, and swimsuits.
Adams’ work was just black and white. Easy.
My first camera camera was about the size and shape of a tube of lipstick and made videos as well (no sound). The images were really bad, but I loved the distortion, light leaks, and grain (well, pixels…).
At some point, I wanted to make black and white images to simplify things, so I needed to use software to do it.
That’s when it dawned on me. What I wanted was out of my reach. I thought I could do it, but I could not. I had seen the best.
I didn’t know.
Confronting the subtle shifts in silver and the full range from black to white floored me. Not only could my digital file not handle it, I lacked the knowledge of how to achieve it. Photoshop made processing very easy, but I was miles away from authenticity.
Over several years, I eventually ended up with film cameras and the series of instructional books by - yep - Ansel Adams: The Camera, The Negative, and The Print.
I looked at those books in dumbfounded silence.
My teenage self of the pop-up calendar shop had his attitude adjusted.
When I didn’t know - when it was “just black and white pictures” it was easy to be quick-witted, judgmental, and dismissive.
It was easy because I was a child. It was easy because I didn’t know.
I now know better because of that experience and many more after it. Life has a way of trying to correct us, even as it develops in nuance and complexity.
I shifted into oil painting many years later and started from the bottom. This time, I had no delusions about my skills (or lack thereof), but it did seem to be purposeful. If you knew what we were going through during those years, you might feel bad for me and support my decision to keep busy with a hobby, but you would also think I was crazy to pursue learning to paint.
Art is the navigation of possibility and will.
It has humbled me and made me slower to judge.
The blacks and whites are … different now. There is a lot of midtone.
Not all art lessons are applicable to life in general, but humility before another human being as they tell you their story surely is and so is being slow to judge. These require listening to different perspectives.
I can do that. I do that all the time.
But how are we to react when we are flooded with niche perspectives? When we are scolded for not supporting them? Repeatedly told that we don’t understand? That if we don’t agree we are part of the problem? That our beliefs are backward and hurtful?
We listen, right? That’s what kind of society we want to live in - one where people are heard. So, we listen. We tolerate, knowing that most things are not Black and White. We understand that there are silvery greys of distinction where finer and finer points need to be made.
And we are still pressed to do more. We are nowadays always pressed to do more. How much more?
When people take over a building, adopt foreign garb and chant slogans with murderous overtones, I watch. I listen. I wait for the subtle point to be made - one I’m surely missing. The wills are somewhat clear, but the possibilities seem limited. I cannot discern the way.
How are we to understand a trendy protest that calls for the dismantling of our values and structures - however flawed - and calls for the adoption of values and structures that would completely vaporize what is left of our identity?
How are we to respond when common sense is questioned and if we don’t have a pithy reply, we get shouted down and leave the scene, and they claim the moral high ground in our absence?
When do the teenagers at the mall stop being the vocal leaders?
When do adults stop taking cues from trends? When does the zeitgeist actually coalesce and remind us that it can’t be everything all at once?
When do we need to unmuddy the midtones and get closer to Black and White with more clarity, more contrast, more simplicity?
Where is the art of discourse?
Where is the navigation of possibility and will?
I am willing to listen so long as the possibility of reason remains. When reason gets buried, I am no longer willing to listen to the privileged youth wail about causes that would destroy the bubble they shout from.
When I was a child, I spoke as a child and thankfully, sometimes I was spanked. I have listened and watched crowds gather more and more frequently only to feel emptier after bearing witness. When the genitalia hats come out, you’ve lost me. When the intifada chant begins, you’ve lost me. When you violently take over parts of a city and people cover for you, and when I get the idea that you have already planned your next protest-of-the-month or when you get your energy from the wake of chaos created by the news, you’ve lost me. I’m tired of being lectured by TikTok teens on the definition of words, but even more tired of media taking their lead from these people who would educate us into oblivion.
I don’t know how to get clarity on issues if things get muddier the more I learn.
Where is the center?
What is the core?
It thunders here in Tennessee as an early summer thunderstorm builds up to release a shower that will clear the atmosphere. I imagine an Ansel Adams silver gelatin print of clouds gathering over an open space - a beautiful mix of rich darks and brilliant lights with delicate midtones - all making the whole stronger than the parts. I think of the paintings I have on the easel: a scrubby Wyoming hill at dusk with a stark moon barely visible but crucial to the whole and another painting with storm clouds covering most of the space with a strip of warm, stone-white ground in the front, heavily contrasting.
I can clarify or obfuscate. What is next? What, indeed, is next?
I listen. I wait. I listen more.
“… a living water speaks within me, saying: “Come to the Father.””
- Ignatius of Antioch
