Timeless Echoes of Black and White

Like the melodies of classical music compositions, traditional folk songs and religious hymns cycling forward through time only to assume new modern forms, the visual arts have their own long history of continuous reinterpretation. For me, black and white photography has always possessed a special kind of mystique because it was the originator of what I do.

Think of how differently we’d be beholding the world, interpreting it, celebrating it, and accurately remembering special moments were it not for the camera?

No matter who we are, each of us stands on the shoulders of earlier giants. Even without color, the simplicity of black and white imagery gives us the chance to experience the majesty of nature in a different but no less impactful way. 

With that in mind, and after a half century of exploring landscapes and wildlife in color, I am happy to announce a new collection of curated black and white photographs presenting wild places and the creatures inhabiting them. I am excited about this collection because the images accentuate the timeless elements that truly make visual fine art impactful—the magical convergence of light, shadow, and the compositional nuances of texture, line, value, and tone.

Early in my career, I was often left awestruck by those legendary visual seekers who came before me. Although they arrived before the advent of modern color photography, they created portraits of the West that stand as testaments of their observational prowess—people like Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, Edward S. Curtis, William Henry Jackson (who accompanied painter Thomas Moran to Yellowstone and helped make the case before Congress for protecting the park) and, of course, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), whose body of work helped ignite the conservation movement as we know it today.

With this new collection, it is my desire to have you “see” deeper meditations on remarkable wild places and appreciate the spirit of other sentient beings. In the absence of color “detail” as the first sensation one usually encounters, these scenes distill the essence of subjects while also creating distinctive moods. 

We are releasing two inaugural images. The first is a portrait I took of a famous grizzly bear mother in Jackson Hole known as “Blondie;” the other a vast shape-shifting dunescape that I encountered along the remote Skeleton Coast of Namibia in southwest Africa. Each image invites introspection and reflection.

As many of you know, Blondie, for many years, has inhabited the same wild neighborhood as the late and recently departed Grizzly Bear Mother 399. A mother herself, Blondie is the face of one of my most resonant photographs I’ve ever made, Eyes of the Grizzly. This black and white portrait you see before you here features Blondie peering toward an approaching bear (out of the frame) as she breathes in the scent of another ursid.

In these times, we are seeing attempts made to demonize grizzlies. When one has time to fully absorb their physical features and experience their personalities by giving them space, we discover they are soulful creatures, not emanating a ferocious “grisly” presence but of sublime, magnetic beauty. In this portrait, I was mesmerized by the textured pattern of Blondie’s hair and her presence, made more poignant in black and white.

As for the Namibian dunes, set in a landscape constantly undergoing morphosis by wind, I followed tracks of lion, cheetah, giraffe, elephant, zebra, and hyena, laid down in the shifting sand, there one minute but gone the next. Seals belly their way onto the beach to bask, and across the centuries, humans have found whale bones. Every morning, the surface was wiped clean amid a sonic convergence of zephyrs inland and crashing waves.

Humbling is that once upon a time, these trillions of sand grains were parts of distant mountains and fossils worn down by the eons. There is something incredibly soothing about the soft, abstract forms in this panorama. It has always been my intent to take the viewer to distant corners of the globe you may never see but can bring them into your lives.

Stand in front of this photo long enough and it may seem as if the lines of shadow are moving in this epic hourglass. Here, time is not running out but allowing us to reflect on the more eternal qualities of our remarkable planet. Nowhere in sight is the permanent proliferation of our species’ dominant footprint. Where we stand reverently, as witnesses praising forces bigger than ourselves, wonder still abounds.

Look for more photographs in this collection coming out soon.