Color is information.  It tells you the sky is blue, the barn is red, the car is rust.  But sometimes all that information gets in the way of what you’re actually trying to see – the shape of a canyon wall, the texture of weathered wood, the expression carved into a hundred-year-old face.

Black and white photography forces both the photographer and the viewer to slow down.  Without color to grab the eye, everything else has to carry the weight – the light and shadow, line and form, texture and one.  The images in this gallery come from places as far apart as the Grand Canyon and an Oklahoma windmill museum, as intimate as horseshoes on a log cabin wall and as vast as the Grand Tetons on the horizon.  What they share is that each revealed something in monochrome that color would have hidden. 

I don’t shoot in black and white as a style choice. I convert to black and white when the image asks for it – when the light is more important than the color, or when the subject has a dignity that color somehow cheapens.  Every image here passed that test.  I hope you find in them what I found; that sometimes taking something away is the most powerful thing you can do.