At the beginning of each new school year, I feel like I need to justify my existence to my students, or perhaps it’s their existence in my classes.  I teach the final three semesters of a four semester music theory and ear training sequence.  Most musicians, unless you are super nerdy like me, probably would not take music theory if it weren’t required to get any kind of degree in music.  I explain to my Theory II class that most of what they will learn is “black and white” material.  The contents of the course can be understood as the grammar and syntax of this language called  music.  In music theory III and IV, the color of the course material becomes gray.  No longer are the answers to questions the black and white of objectivity; they are saturated in the gray of subjective thought.  Continuing with my language analogy, I tell these second year students that our study of music is now more like the study of literature.  We all can read the same words of a poem or listen to the same notes of a piece of music, but what we perceive between the notes and beyond the notes is different for each one of us because of our unique being and experiences.  Creating, forming, supporting, and articulating a personal understanding of a piece of music is what music theory is really all about.  Wallowing amidst this sea of gray makes us better listeners. It makes us better performers. And, it makes us better thinkers.

When people ask me what my favorite color is, I always say, without hesitation, blue!  On a more philosophical level though, my response might more accurately be gray.  I like that my mind is happiest wallowing in the gray areas of life, the place of many possibilities.  Interestingly, this very thought kept me from being selected for jury duty the one time I made it to the small pool where the actual attorneys asked questions of prospective jurors.  I was the first of the panel to be questioned.

The lawyers said, “You are a theorist?”

“Yes sir.  I am a music theorist.”

“So, you spend your days looking at the theoretical?”

“Yes.”

“Are you capable of looking at a situation and seeing black and white?”

“Possibly, but I don’t think that anything is really black and white.  Most of life exists somewhere in between, in the gray area.”

“Thank you.  I have no more questions.”

I was dismissed from the jury pool.

This month, because I needed to shake up my everyday photography, I decided to shoot exclusively in black and white.  As with analyzing a piece of music and looking between and beyond the notes, for me, shooting in black and white made me look beyond colors to see and appreciate what else is in a photo..  I know that sounds silly, but photographers can, I think, rely too much on color in photos.  Without color, shape, contrast, and texture must carry a photo.  An intimate relationship with light is necessary to convey the richness of these things in an image.  Light creates gray amidst the black and white.  I found myself approaching composition completely differently this month than I do when I’m shooting in color.  This was the challenge that I needed to get me out of the creative funk that enveloped me most of the summer.

I have always loved black and white portraits.  When I look back through my own images, my favorite portraits of my family are almost all monochrome.  But other than a few photos of architecture or the occasional minimalistic still life where black and white more effectively brings out the light and shadow of an object, I didn’t often consider black and white for my everyday photos.  Doing so this month happened sort of by accident.  My first two daily photos of the month, coincidentally, I did as black and white.  And oddly, neither was a portrait.  Both were taken in the garden, one of leaves on a shrub and the other a vine on a melon plant.  A fellow photographer initiated a challenge to continue with the black and white photos throughout the month and I accepted the challenge while also continuing to follow the Capture Your 365 August daily photo prompts.

I learned to think creatively when the daily prompt was green.  Green in black and white.  That certainly provided a challenge.

After thirty-one straight days, I am just starting to feel a bit more confident shooting without color.  I definitely need to do a black and white month each year as part of my photo a day project, as well as to intersperse more of them into the other months.

Click on the link below to see all of August in Black and White.

August Video

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