There are a few monochrome film photographs scattered around the galleries on this site, but this is the only place entirely dedicated to b&w film work. The photographs were nearly all made in the early years of the century on Tri-X film using Bronica 6x6 and Mamiya 7 cameras. Most of them are scans of finished prints, rather than scans of negs. So they look like what I intended the prints to look like then, rather than being an altogether different interpretation from scanned negs.

And that's where the similarities end. There's no thematic link or location focus here; they are quite simply what I consider to be amongst the most satisfying photographs from a time in which I was making colour slides and b&w prints pretty much side-by-side, choosing the medium I thought was most appropriate to what I was trying to draw from that subject. Surprisingly I rarely felt afterwards that a subject I'd captured in b&w would have looked better in colour. I thought then - and now- that it's easier to make a photograph seem timeless in b&w. Even to the point of creating a print that looks as if it might have been made far earlier than it was.

Of course its easier now since I can decide after the event whether a subject is best suited to colour or b&w. But strangely enough I'm not sure that this flexibility has improved my judgment any, and a smaller proportion of the photographs I make end up as monochrome than they did fifteen years or so ago. I don't think I actively look for b&w opportunities now whereas I certainly did in film days. I think I rather miss having to decide this very important parameter before pressing the shutter.