Portfolio: Black and White Singles // 30 Photos

A portfolio of black and white personal and press singles, 2006 - 2012.

Colour photography is the dominant medium for news photography in today's world. Newspapers, wire services, magazines and online publications largely want their assignments completed with saturation, colour pictures - deadline yesterday!

For me, however, photojournalism and documentary photography's roots are in the world of black and white. I was schooled in a darkroom in Sydney, Australia, by my good friend Chris Reid, in how one works with just 36 frames on a roll, how to agitate the tanks just so, and how to print my own contacts for editing and archiving.

The use of black and white film is a meditation on light, composition and timing that requires something extra from a photographer - something the high speed, computer-assisted processes of the digital will never replace or even fully replicate. The slowness of the medium, the discipline and knowledge required to correctly develop one's negatives well, the 'quiet' space and the dim lights of a well set darkroom make the practice of photography in monochrome something that will never die in my practice.

Since those early days, I've continued to shoot black and white film, and also to regularly convert my digital files to monochrome and build edits in contrast rather than colour for the majority of my personal documentary work.

This gallery is a collection of black and white singles, primarily from the Middle East in the pre-Arab Spring years of 2006 - 2010, and some work from my time here after the revolts of 2011. There are also samples of continuing long term projects in Asia.