Cape Light

I've been thinking about the different properties of colour and black and white film and how these contribute to meaning. Although of course I have used colour film in the past, since I became serious about building a body of work I have used only black and white and digital. This is because of the level of control I can maintain over the appearance of the photograph from capture to print. Yet now in trying to record these solar rituals I find that I need to use colour, that black and white film is not creating the sense of half forgotten memory that I feel photographing these events; and it is important to me that there is a material product created at the instant of capture, so I can't use digital. Joel Meyerowitz explains what this difference means to him in the interview with Bruce MacDonald which prefaces the 'Cape Light' catalogue:

MacDonald: 'What's the difference between light in black and white and light in colour photography? Do you relate differently to the light?

Meyerowitz: 'The fact is that colour film appears to be responsive to the full spectrum of visible light while black and white reduces the spectrum to a very narrow wavelength. This stimulates in the user of each material a different set of responses. A colour photograph gives you a chance to study and remember how things look and feel in colour. It enables you to have feelings along the full wavelength of the spectrum, to retrieve emotions that were perhaps bred in you from infancy- from the warmth and pinkness of your mother's breast, the loving brown of your puppy's face and the friendly yellow of your pudding. Colour is always part of experience. Grass is green, not gray; flesh is colour, not gray. Black and white is a very cultivated response.'

MacDonald: 'What you're saying is that black and white translates light from all the different hues into tone, and there is no way to tell the light reflected from a red from the light reflected from a black?'

Meyerowitz: 'Close. It expresses the light as a matter of intensity. There's no meaning attached to the light.

MacDonald: 'Black and white photography translates colour into form whereas colour photography can convey significance from the very roots of the act of vision itself, from a place where you respond to primal kinds of things- colours, textures, sensations. What does that do for you the sense that you can deal now with all of those primary responses about colour?

Meyerowitz: 'It makes everything more interesting. Colour suggests more things to look at, new subjects for me. Colour suggests that light itself is a subject....'