A mini series within a mini series. Basically 3 classic pictures of palm trees that I absolutely love. I know, I know, sunsets, palm tree silhouettes, so cliché and so overdone. But, they still pull at the heartstrings. And, in my defense, there is a little something in each one of these images that rescues it from the mainstream a little. See if you can find them.
But, that’s actually not the point of this post anyway. Just a little background for the specific images.
Why aren’t you selling any black and white images?
Black and white film is my jam. I shoot it more than anything else. I develop it myself. I mentally find a way to ‘see’ every scene or image I have created in black and white. I love everything about it. So, the question is absolutely valid.
Truth be told, I’m working hard to begin sharing my work. To let some things out in the wild. That process means letting go of something that feels very personal and something I have strong opinions on and potentially handing it to the wolves. I haven’t felt ready to do that in so many ways. But, I’m trying. And the beginning of that is color.
The color images have a kitschy, nostalgic feeling. Something that feels good to look at. Maybe (hopefully) something that resonates with others in a way that says, yeah, I love that, I want one of those. They feel light and easy to let go of, easy to talk about, easy to see hanging in peoples houses. They print well from a lab.
Black and white is clinging to me like a web. Yelling at me like an unruly child to give it what it needs. To be blatantly honest, I think we are doing black and white film a disservice by scanning it into a digital form and running it through a printer. The soul and the connection and the magic of actually printing an image from a negative onto light sensitive paper, and developing it by hand, just isn’t there with the digital scan. That is not to say images printing with this process look bad, they don’t. It is just not where I feel my energy photographically at this time. I am currently building the foundations for a home darkroom. When this comes to fruition, there will be more black and white images out in the world with Limited Edition print runs and originals for show.
until then…
this image.
This was shot from a borrowed camera when I was in college and just dabbling in photography. I was mostly interested because I had a little/big crush on a boy who was taking art classes. I used his camera and walked around the neighborhood with it. He told me he needed the roll of film in it so I could only shoot a couple frames. I felt bad. I shot one. It was this one. When he developed the negatives, he cut out the one neg that belonged to me and handed it to me as such. One tiny little jagged square of black and white film. I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with it at the time, so I put it in a white business envelope, folded it in half and stuck it in a desk drawer. I barely looked at it. At that time, 20+ years ago, it didn’t mean that much to me. When I moved out of the dorm, it went into a box of desk stuff, then got dumped out in a bigger box with spiral notebooks and miscellaneous art supplies. It moved around with me from my dorm, to my parents house, to the house I bought with my husband. When I finally started taking photography classes at the community college, I found it and tried to develop it in the darkroom. It was one of my very first darkroom prints ever. And it was awful. The neg is scratched and splattered with a sticky substance that I couldn’t remove. It’s underexposed. It’s printable, but it’s messy. Each scratch and splatter would take an eternity for me to spot out by hand.
Enter the digital age. This is a scan, digitally edited using photoshop to lighten it up and spot out all the damages, mostly in the sky. And thus, after that long drawn out saga and my strong opinions on printing black and white film, I am actually printing this through a photo lab in the same process as the color images and making it available. And, yeah, I love it. Darkroom or not.
And, come full circle, I ended up living in this neighborhood 20+ years after walking around here during college. I wanted to re-photograph this exact cluster of trees and that tiny little roofline of that house. I spent countless hours in the streets of my neighborhood, but could never find these exact trees. Maybe that’s some of the magic of all this photography stuff anyway. You can never truly recreate anything. It holds the magic of the exact moment in time in which it was first seen.
So, here you have them. Three pictures of palm trees. They are pretty. They are for sale.
Check them out in the SoCal Series on this site.