Why Black and White?
People sometimes ask why I work almost entirely in black and white. The simple answer is: it’s how I first learned to see.
When I was a child growing up in Gibraltar, I built makeshift darkrooms in whatever space I could find; sometimes a closet, sometimes the bathroom sealed off with towels and tape. I developed black and white film by hand, watching the images emerge slowly in trays of chemicals under a red light. It felt like magic. More than that, it was accessible, immediate, and physical in a way color never was. Color film was expensive, and printing in color required equipment I didn’t have. But black and white? That I could do at home.
Those early prints were grainy, imperfect and luminous. They left a deep impression. I think part of me has always been trying to return to that sense of wonder and simplicity.
There’s also something about growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, when images of the American West, cowboys, deserts, endless skies, filtered through our black-and-white television set. Even before I ever set foot in the desert, I’d seen it in monochrome: John Ford landscapes flickering across the screen, stark light and shadow playing across the rocks. Those images etched themselves into memory long before I knew what “fine art photography” even meant.
As I got older and began photographing landscapes in earnest, I found that black and white still suited how I saw. It strips away the distractions and invites a kind of clarity. It lets the structure of the land speak. And perhaps most importantly, it gives space to mood, memory, and quiet.
Valley of the Gods, Utah.
Working in black and white isn’t a rule, I’ve worked with color photographs too, but it feels truer to the way I respond to the land. It’s less about what a place looks like, and more about how it feels in that moment: the weight of shadow, the texture of stone, the hush before a change in weather.
—Lewis
