I have received my copy of Color Rush (thanks to TOP for the recommendation). Fabulous. I am reminded of how much I love the look of Autochromes.

For a while I intended that I would only make my photographs available as black and white prints. But for many images the color provides a magic which for me is lost when I convert it to black and white. Of course, that might just reflect my abilities, limitations, when making such conversions. It might also explain why so many black & white photographs seem so vague, if not blurry, to me; they show why there is the alternative name of grayscale; gray indeed. Well, the real alternative would be monochrome, but you get the idea.

Of course, medium is important, and execution even more so. Books seem at an intrinsic disadvantage to prints, when both are done to their highest capability, and most books are not. And a computer screen is perhaps too flat to reveal the nuances in a good black and white photograph. Once you have seen, once I had seen, an Edward Weston print for example, I had a ‘picture’ of what black and white looked like, and was probably condemned to find all else lacking.

So on a positive note, I am happy to see, not only how many good examples of color photography are contained in Color Rush, but also how well they have been reproduced in the pages of the book. And the sadness, is that I will not be able to get over to Milwaukee to see the prints themselves; the exhibition ends on May 19 and we have not been able to contemplate such a long road trip since I learnt about it.

There are indeed a great many photographers listed in the book, each with one or more photographs and a page of text. Some I had already heard of, (including the samples from Adams and Weston). But there are many ‘new’ ones to disover, and more to learn about them all. There are also a couple of interesting looking essays at the start that I still need to sit down and read.