She was my first love. I found her on the pages of “Life Magazine” and hanging from the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts. She was small, rich in the colors of black and white. She was the representation of an artist’s reaction to life. She was the etchings of Rembrandt and Brueghel and the photographs of Weston and Smith. Her images were honest, brutal and beautiful. She inspired my first black and white photographs. It was love at first sight. It became my method of interpretation of life as I felt it.
Musicians often reinterpret their work. Visual artists tend to create with the sprit of one and done. While visual artists might work on a theme or style for a series we seldom go back to the single original and rework it.
Recently I have had occasion to revisit some recent photographs. A client had asked me to convert a couple images into black and white. I did not simply do an image>mode>grayscale in Photoshop but I went back to the original raw file and completely reworked it. It was like bumping into my first love all over again. Seeing these images anew in Black and White rekindled a passion that had been left behind.
Sincerely,
Zave Smith
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