My current favorite modern art gallery: West Chelsea Contemporary. In Austin.
I figured I could sit around on the couch and watch all the old Star Wars movies again or I could ignore the fading side effects of my two vaccines from yesterday and get back to normal stuff. I chose the normal stuff. I've been having a renewed love affair with the Leica CL so I decided to take one of the pair downtown along with the tiny Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 Contemporary lens. It's the one that only covers APS-C. Almost a perfect match for the CL except for a little bit of vignetting... Not much. Just enough so that I find myself correcting it if there's a lot of "sky" in the photographs...
The gallery is across the street from my usual parking place so it makes for a nice transitional launchpad into a good, downtown walk. The gallery leans strongly toward graffiti inflected works and that's just fine with me although they do toss in a statue of Kip's Big Boy every once in a while; just for fun.
Michael Johnston can be a powerful, subliminal influencer and ever since he embarked on his quest for "purity" in black and white digital imaging I've been trying more and more often to do my own tests and my own work with "monochrome" in mind. I'm not willing to go as far as MJ and mutilate a sensor in order to make it permanently into a black and white camera but I am constantly trying new processing formulas and camera settings to see what I can get. The "Butterfly" bridge that connects downtown to downtown is a willing and patient subject. It's twice as nice now that both sides of the pedestrian sidewalks are now open.
The lure to black and white seems strong for some in my generation and I think it's pretty obvious that this is because most of us learned the craft by shooting (then) less expensive black and white film and learning to do our own processing and printing in black and white darkrooms. I know that I have an affection for black and white even when I presume that many photographs look better in color, or have their reason to exist based in colors and hues.
It seems obvious that black and white works best for very graphic subjects but lately I see it pressed into service in many of the niches that perhaps should be left to color. Almost as if, in the rush to make everything black and white we end up with "missing pieces."
Plenty of good image making power in a small and light system. A nice change from the bigger cameras.
