Adam Harrison writes at length regarding black and white photography:

"While I am interested in what you have been saying about black and white
photography, it seems that the strictures you have created for yourself
can only be counter-productive to good picture-making. As I believe you
also do, I think that really great art has only ever been made by a
simultaneous reverance of the past and a blind leap towards the future.
But I don't think that looking forward means restricting the forms of
the 'past' from one's repetoire. Painting is not obsolete because it
still exists; therefore it is contemporary. Same goes for black and
white photography.

There are new possibilities for b&w; ones that did not exist in the days
of Atget, or of Evans, or even until this decade. No one, for example,
that I know of, has made serious black and white work using digital
technology in the way that, say, Scott McFarland has. It was not even
concievable to make a truly monochrome digital print until very recent
inkjet technology.

The figures you name -- 'Atget; Hill & Adamson; Winogrand; Evans; the
Bechers; Friedlander; Fox Talbot; Julia Margaret Cameron; Nadar & etc.'
-- are not black and white photographers, but rather photographers, or
simply artists. They have not exhausted the possibility of black and
white any more than Velazquez, or Vermeer, or Newman have colour.

Things look a certain way, depicted in the manner they are, and looking
at things in different ways can only be fruitful, never redundant. The
'private museum in your head' is not watching from above, but rather
more like the figures all but invisible in Jeff Wall's Night; deep in
the shadows of all of your images, waiting there for you to do them
well."

(Image: Adam Harrison, Tree Trunk, November 15)

- posted by cjb @ 9:02 PM