The World of Black, White and Gray | Anna TX Child Photographer

This is my daughter.

I took this image of her last night. It’s not a stellar image by any means…the catch light in her right eye could be more prominent, a sign that I was using an uneven light source and not compensating for it. The left side of her face errs on the side of too bright, the right side around the eyes a little too dark. I had to coerce her into letting me take this image by bribing her with Goldfish. And I only got one shot.

The reason I wanted to take this image was because there was something about the way she looked in that moment that I wanted to capture. Something about her little three-year old self that I wanted to remember. Orneriness, perhaps? The way she forgets to brush her hair? I am trying to learn to take better black and white images, and I also thought this would be a good image to practice on. I’m still learning.

The thing that struck me with this photo was the timing. Just after editing this image, I switched over to CNN and read of the fatal shootings of the 5 Dallas police officers. This came on the heels of the tragic deaths of Philandro Castile and Alton Sterling. The media has been abuzz with terrible news of our intolerance for one another. My mind is all over the place with so many thoughts, but let me try to make some sort of order from what I am thinking.

Black and white. Black and white.

As I have been on this recent self-challenge to learn to take better black and white images, one rule in particular has shown up again and again: in the world of black and white, gray is the color that makes a photograph interesting. In a photograph, the color black represents the absence of light, while white signals the presence of too much. If you have an image that is solely black and white, there is a lot of information that is missing. While you only have one shade of black and one shade of white, there are 253 shades of gray. The presence of gray in an image is what gives it life and tells the story.

I bring this up because I see a lot of black and white in our society today.

Black. White.
Blue. Red.
Religious. Non-religious.
The 1%. Welfare.
Liberal. Conservative.
One side constantly vetted against another.
Constant categories.
Few scratches beyond the surface.

Is it perpetuated by the media? Perhaps. By opinionated rants unchecked over social media? Probably. But that is not really the point I want to make. Finger pointing, name calling and blaming for our nation’s faults as a whole has gone on far too long. What do these images of black and white paint for us as a whole? For me, we are seeing only partial images…strong dynamics that are lacking the details that a true story tells.

Please indulge me as I take a side step for a moment and talk about our brains.

Our brains are amazing things. From day to day, our brain’s activities function in two main ways: slow and deliberate, the other quick and automatic. We tend to be at our best selves when we are thinking slowly and deliberately. This is the area of the brain that forms rational thoughts, invents new ideas, relates to others on an emotional level. While this might be our highest level of functioning, it also tends to tire out quickly. Enter the automatic side of what we do. This is the part of our brain that recognizes patterns and routines and converts them into habits or automatic processes. It frees up a lot of effort for our deliberate brain to work hard when it needs to. In a perfect world, we would all be functioning with a perfect balance between deliberate rationalism and automatic efficiency.

But we are not living in a perfect world. Our brains sometimes can be too efficient, even to the level that we are unaware. Every day, we go about our lives and subconsciously feed our brains new information. Our brains process and sort the information in efficient ways that make sense, to the point that it will sometimes present to us an alternate reality. In a study performed by the University of Giessen, Germany, researchers showed volunteers an image of a gray banana and asked them to recreate the shade on a computer screen. Although the banana was purely gray, the volunteers still had a hard time not matching it to a shade of gray with a tinge of yellow.

My point? Our perceptions, our experiences, our biases to what we ‘know’ to be true will paint our realities for us. Our brains are constantly on a quest to find efficiency; often, that means it is easier for us to discard or not even recognize information that does not align with the reality we have already created for ourselves.

When we see the world in just black and white, we are relying on our instinctual parts of our brains. While this may be efficient, we are not at our best selves. Have you ever been in a neutral mood,  logged onto facebook, spent a few minutes and left fuming angry? While our automatic brains are incredibly efficient, they are also so very defensive. Spend too much time in angry mode, and you are not your best self or able to make rational thoughts or decisions. You are in survival mode. When we paint our world in black and white, we are opening the doors to allow ourselves to be controlled by our animalistic instincts, and unfortunately, that is not our smartest selves.

I will jump back to my point now. Our world is both a beautiful and a terrifying place. There is both evil and wonderful goodness–we have to learn how to make our world a better place to live, both in our personal realities and in the world beyond. To truly make a difference for ourselves and for others, we must go beyond seeing the world in just black and whites. If the world we paint for ourselves is made solely of these two colors, we are living in a world without real information. As a photographer, I am always trying to chase the story in my images. I cannot do that if I am leaving information out. Photography-wise, there is nothing as devastating as capturing an incredible moment, looking at my settings and realizing I completely blew the image out by allowing too little or not enough light in. I lost the moment. As a human being, I cannot make the same devastating mistake in my own life. Though it might challenge my comfort zone, I must always strive to look for better light sources, for better information to paint my world.

Our world is hurting. It always has. I’m sure it always will. But I cannot help it by fitting individuals into neat little boxes.

I am a woman.
I am white.
I am in my thirties.
I am a veteran.
I am a moderate.
I am a mother.
I earn low wages.
I have religious beliefs.
I am an artist.
I am college educated.

I may be all of these things, but even these descriptions fall short of describing who I am as an individual. Anyone looking solely at the demographics, or especially at one in particular, would fall terribly short of knowing who I am as a person. Let’s look less at categories, and begin to see each other as the wonderfully complex individuals that we are.

This is my daughter. She is three years old. She looks at the world through innocent eyes.

I want to make this world a better place for her to be.