A world without color and the magic of Monochrome..

Paris, France, 1996

Midwest, 2023

Much of my time as a teenager was spent in my bedroom- which had been turned into a darkroom- trying to perfect the art of the black and white print. Considered by some as a strange teenage lad, I would spend the days under a makeshift safe light, an empty red Brylcreem pot with a bulb shoved into it. Shutting myself away for days on end the smell of fixer never quite left. The enlarger, a fabulous construction made up of a large baked bean tin and half a tripod served me well and was even used later to make contact prints when I opened a commercial darkroom in North London in the 90’s.

It wasn’t until a few years ago I returned to black and white photography, a combination of finding my old leica (and getting it fixed) and a trip along Route 66 from San Francisco to Chicago (both images here were made with the same camera). I soon realized the joy of monochrome never really went away, it just lay dormant for a while while the photography world panicked over digital.

Seeing the images appear as they do in a tray of developer is still a magical moment for me and I often find myself venturing out with that old camera loaded with black and white film.