Elliott Erwitt once said that color is descriptive and black and white is interpretive. I've been thinking about that distinction for most of my photographic life, and the longer I think about it, the more I believe both things are necessary.


Not one or the other. Both.


When I look at a landscape, I don't see it once. I see it twice, once in color, once without it. The two images exist simultaneously in my mind, and they're often telling different stories about the same scene. That doubling has become so automatic that I'm not sure I could turn it off if I tried.


What Color Does

Color carries information that black and white simply can't. The particular green of new grass after a winter rain in the Marin hills. The way Death Valley sand goes from gold to orange to pink in the twenty minutes around sunset. The deep blue of the Pacific on a clear October morning, different from the gray-green it becomes when the fog is close.


These aren't decorative details. They're part of what the place actually is. Color tells you the season, the hour, the temperature, the quality of the air. It puts you there in a way that black and white doesn't try to.


When I'm working in color, I'm paying attention to the relationship between tones, the warm against the cool, the saturated against the muted. A landscape photograph in color is partly a photograph of light itself, of the specific quality of illumination on that particular day at that particular hour. You can't fake it and you can't recreate it. You either catch it or you miss it.

Winding road into the El Valle Sagrado de los Incas in Peru with the Andes Mountains in the background
Full moon rising over desert sand dunes with mountain range silhouette against blue twilight sky.
Golden sunset over calm ocean with dramatic clouds and glowing orange sky.
Aerial view of a large ocean rock formation with crashing waves at golden sunset.
Layered golden silhouettes of forested hills create a stunning sunset landscape with warm orange hues.
Golden wild grass seed heads glowing in warm sunlight in a meadow field.
Golden sunset silhouettes mountain ridges with misty haze rising from desert floor.
Dramatic orange lenticular clouds over vast desert valley with distant mountain range at sunset.
A camouflage-painted adventure van parked on a coastal bluff during a vibrant golden Oregon sunset.
Dramatic fiery orange sunset over calm ocean waters with glowing sun touching the horizon beneath layered clouds.
A majestic snow-capped Alpine mountain towers over a wildflower meadow with yellow blooms under dramatic cloudy skies.
Mount Etna volcanic eruption at night showing bright orange lava streams flowing down dark slopes.
What Black and White Does


Black and white removes all of that and asks you to look at something else: structure, tone, texture, form. Without color, the eye moves differently through a frame. It follows edges and gradients instead of hue. It notices the way shadow defines a dune, the way mist softens the distinction between water and sky, the way a single dark figure against a bright horizon carries a weight that color would dilute.


For me, black and white photography has always been a metaphor as much as a technique. Life is rarely the absolutes we wish it were. It lives in the gray area between certainties, in nuance, in ambiguity, in the infinite tonal variations between pure light and pure shadow. A black and white photograph accepts that. It works with complexity rather than trying to resolve it.


My uncle Charlie, who first put a camera in my hands, shot almost exclusively in black and white. He had an eye for the structure of things, the geometry of a shadow, the texture of a weathered wall. I absorbed that way of seeing before I knew what I was absorbing, and it has never left me.


black and white image of a dirt road to the eureka dunes
Black and white photo of a white horse standing in tall grass with misty mountains behind.
Misty black and white landscape with a lone tree, birds in flight, and glowing sun through fog.
Black and white aerial view of endless rolling sand dunes in a vast desert landscape.
Black and white dramatic silhouette of a surfer riding inside a massive breaking ocean wave.
black and white image of clouds over the sierras in south lake tahoe
Black and white photograph of a full moon rising over rugged mountain ridgeline above a desert basin.
Minimalist black and white photography of rippling sand dune patterns under a cloudy sky.
Moody black and white photo of pale sand dunes beneath dramatic stormy clouds and dark mountains.
Dramatic black and white landscape of snow-capped rocky mountains with dense forest in the foreground.
Full moon illuminates snow-capped mountain peaks through dramatic storm clouds in monochrome.
Black and white photo of powerful ocean waves crashing against rocky shore under dramatic cloudy sky.
Why I Can't Choose


People sometimes ask me which I prefer. It's the wrong question, or at least it's the wrong frame for how I actually work.


Some images are color images. The sunset at Drakes Beach when the chalk cliffs go amber, the light on Tomales Bay just after sunrise, color is doing work there that I wouldn't want to give up. Other images are black and white images. The Mesquite Flat Dunes under a full moon, the exposed beaches at Point Reyes in November, the fog hanging over the Marin hills before dawn. Strip the color from those and something is clarified rather than lost.


And then there are images that are genuinely both, where the color version and the black and white version are different photographs with different things to say. Those are the ones I find most interesting. They're not the same image in two formats. They're two separate ways of seeing the same moment.


That's why I bring both home.