Artist Statement
For me, art implies a transcendence or transformation of the literal, the everyday. When I load a camera with black and white film, I've already taken a big step away from the recording of everyday reality. Since the world around us is not black and white, every black and white photo is already an abstraction, an important first step in a creative process. Color on the other hand tugs us back toward the literal, toward the everydayness of the world around us, the expected rather than the unexpected. Photographers and critics alike have been quick to sense this, and this, I believe, is what has led so many people to dismiss color landscape photography as a serious or artistic endeavor. But the literal side of color film is a point of departure not a dead end. In order to turn the color landscape photo into a personal or poetic expression, photographers must look to, and explore other avenues of abstraction. They must use other means than a monochrome tonality to establish the distance from the real observed landscape needed to create a new landscape in the photo, rather than just a copy of everything that's out there.
From On the Color Landscape, by Linde Waidhofer