12.09.23
“Ride the Highway West Baby……..The West is the Best”
I don’t think Jim Morrison of the Doors had Hokitika in mind but what better lyrics could describe my passion for the West Coast. Just ignore the rest of the lyrics especially the F words and kill words. “This is the End” title is also appropriate as the Haast pass was closed . It was the end . That is when I decided to take the 900km detour backwards to Glenorchy. See “Worth the Detour”. No I didn’t have the car in reverse.
After Glenorchy my next destination was to stay in Geraldine. Normally I would travel on highway 8 via the Lindis Pass which is the way I came to Glenorchy -see “Worth a Detour?”. But there was a danger the Pass would be closed due to heavy snow. So I decided to go on highway 85 between Ranfurly and Palmerston. This is know as the “pig route”. Apparently Google says it’s called that, not because of transportation of certain live stock but the route was a “Pig of a route” to travel on in the old days. It must have been very rough. Some of my B&W landscapes were along the Pig route. What was amazing was how clean the road was even though there was lots of snow on the sides. I enquired about this with my guide and he said in the middle of the night the roads are swept to remove the snow routinely. Unsung heroes I say. Reminds me of the movie with Liam Neeson called “Cold Pursuit”. Anyway I safely got to Geraldine which is one of my favorite towns in NZ. The next day my guide Wayne Keenan picked me up for my third visit exploring the Rangitata Gorge. Towards the end of the day I was photographing the deer in the fields looking for the most attractive one and the local farmer stopped by to enquire who this voyeur was. I meekly replied “I was looking for Bambi”…. Only kidding. Jamie was just finishing his work on the field I was photographing and he stopped for a chat. It was great for Wayne as he travels this road a lot and its good to know the locals, especially when you get stuck in the mud or snow! Anyway Jamie really looked like the “Southern Man” of the Speights adverts. Dressed to kill and a vehicle that actually looks like it fulfills its design brief. Not like a large SUV in the suburbs that rarely gets any mud on it. So I asked him to pose for me for some environmental portraits. I was in my element as well, travel photography featuring the locals, but this time it was Rangitata not Myanmar.
I was speaking to a photographer a while back, and I have forgotten who, but what he said has always resonated at the back of my mind- “I don’t get Black and White landscape photography”.
Maybe its because he sees the world in colour? I mentioned the greats such as Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The argument followed that they only had B&W film at the time.
However on Googling the question Ansel Adams did shoot in colour. In fact over 3500 shots, but this represented a very small proportion of his work. He mainly used colour for his commercial work to bring in some income to support his family and his creativity.
However he found the colour medium frustrating as he had no control over the final print. It was definitely hit and miss those days. Even today if you get a digital print made the colours are never consistent if redone at a later date. Imagine what he could have done with a digital camera and photoshop at his disposal? And naturally he would have very exacting colour calibration tools as well!
B&W is the medium in which I started photography in the late 1960s. I had my uncles enlarger and printed in mums laundry with the windows blocked out with black plastic. I learnt to see the world in B&W. When I went to work in Hong Kong in the early 80s, only colour film was available. I had to learn to see the world in colour. To get control back in producing a print worthy of exhibition I taught myself colour printing . Those days it took over an hour and lots of test prints to produce one acceptable result!. B&W didn’t even feature much in my work apart from reproducing old work done in NZ. I was concentrating producing work without the usual colour imagery clichés
Now when I do B&W it is after the fact rather than originally intentional. When the image has lots of contrast, emotion, texture, B&W can really emphasize the feeling the photographer wants to achieve.
Today, though, their is a pining for things retro.
Vinyl is back in truckloads. Film is back , why? That could be a topic for a blog another day. Over ear head phones are popular now as opposed to earbuds. Movie theatres are back, but alas no video stores. And of course B&W is back. One of my friends sent me some images taken with his Leica monochrome. Leica make a couple of cameras which only take pictures in B&W and normally retail north of $10,000 ! The blacks were gorgeous, and it had more shades of grey than the book – that made me blush ! Pentax have also brought out an SLR that only does B& W I was tempted for a few seconds….In home theatre the best projectors boast of the deepest blacks. Better whiskies have a black label. Black cars in movies have a sinister or aristocratic value. Black tie means formal and important. I love black jellybeans. Get the picture, Black is Back…….
Here are my interpretations of NZ landscapes in B&W taken on my South Island road trip 2022.
