THE DESERT IN MONOCHROME

As a budding young photographer, I was interested in both color and black-and-white photography. We live in an infinitely colorful world, and I wanted to share the chromatic beauty I experienced, but I grew up during the 1970s, and the world was still rich with black-and-white imagery. I witnessed the expressive potential of the medium through television and cinema, and through the photographs of Ansel Adams. While few photographers have successfully used color photography in a distinct departure from the conventions of the medium, black-and-white photography remains charged with unlimited creative potential, in both visual aesthetics and printing. I wanted to use the medium to alter my own reality and to create new worlds because it is unrestrained by limitations of veracity and rarely considered gaudy or overprocessed—a threshold quickly arrived at with color.

I began practicing the art and craft of photography more than 30 years ago, and as a California native naturalist and mountaineer, I found my photographic interests mainly in the landscapes of the Sierra Nevada. This is where my early inspirations Ansel Adams and Galen Rowell had made many of their works. But I failed to find my own unique signature in the