A Question of Color

Off the top - apologies. I knew it had been a while since I last put pen to paper here but I hadn’t realized it’s been over a year since my last (/second…) journal entry. Despite ‘write more’ being near the top of my 2025 To-Do list, April is here and I find myself struggling to string coherent sentences together. I’ll blame the lack of follow through on a tumultuous start to the year here in Los Angeles, an even greater chaotic couple of weeks since on the macroeconomic front, and this general sense of ‘meh’ I’ve felt towards my photography recently.

On that latter front specifically, I’ve tried to grasp why there’s been such a cloud of melancholic indifference hanging over the camera. After some reflection, over cups of coffee and my fifth Youtube series on ‘street photography’ that really isn’t ‘street photography’ at all, a disarming question has bubbled up out of my psyche’s murk:

‘What’s the point of all of this at the end of the day?’

Which sounds a bit dramatic, because the point is to create and to have fun doing that and to share your work and, in general, to explore yourself and your place in the world around you. But nevertheless, the question has been asked and it’s a hard one to un-ask once it’s out there.

And it’s an important one, because ‘the point’ these days is often geared towards social media output, and I’ve had to homeschool myself in the University of NGAF in that regard. Old habits are hard to break and F’s are still given, just at an ever-decreasing-rate. One would have thought that this form of 21st century enlightenment would’ve led to some sort of nirvana moment, all of the photographic tumblers falling into position, the door to true happiness behind the lens thrusting itself wide open. Alas, that has not been the case.

The englightenment that has occured has been this realization that, when the final bell has rung, I’m not sure I’ll be comfortable with a body of work that only makes sense in retrospect. For a while now, the connective tissue of my photographs has been obvious - Porsches, and old ones at that, in situ in the environs of Los Angeles and the greater Western United States. It’s work that will always be special to me, and many of the photographs I’ve taken check those emotive boxes that make a photo worth looking at for a period of time. At some point, I’ll probably make a book of this work, and the art of the Great American Roadtrip will always hold a special place in my heart. But I’ll admit that I also struggle to see how this specific subject fits within the greater canon of photography at the end of the day.

So I guess this mismash of recent color photos represents a bit of an intentional shift away from the ‘take pictures of stuff I find interesting’ mentality I’ve had over these last few years, and an attempt to get into a mindset of ‘take compelling photographs that mean something when looked at holistically’. Said differently, have an idea in mind, and go explore that idea from behind the lens.

In A Question of Color, Joel Meyerowitz outlines those very first days of picking up a camera and quickly wondering why color was viewed as the lesser stepchild to the black and white form of the medium. A project - one with lasting impact - was immediately born out of that so-simple-as-to-be-self-evident question. Josef Koudelka photographed what it was like to be an immigrant far away from home. Gordon Parks photographed the Black experience in America in the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, Dorothea Lange the migrant farmer’s plight during the Dust Bowl. Deanna Dikeman spent 27 years photographing waving goodbye to her parents in her driveway - an experience I think nearly all of us can relate to in some form or another. Something nearly as simple as choosing to photograph in color vs. black and white, and the beauty of the project lies in that very simplicity.

There are a few ideas bouncing around in my head, and undoubtedly a lot of fleshing out needs to occur between now and whatever eventual project will take place. And I’m sure there’ll be some hand-wringing and picking-up-of-very-old-and-very-bad-habits along the way (to that end, I have two automotive events on the calendar in the next few weeks, woo!). But the drive is there and the inner voice has been hard to silence, which feels like a step in the right direction. More to report over the coming months. As always, see you out there.

Down Broken Roads