There is something so captivating about a black and white photograph. The contrasting tones and varying shades can offer the viewer a more reflective experience than an image saturated with color. Elements of the image become more noticeable, the noise is gone, and often black and white images carry a sense of nostalgia in them. I can spend hours pouring over the shadows and highlights of Ansel Adams’s landscapes or the stark contrasts and luminous skin tones of Herb Ritts’s portraits.
My passion for photography began with me shooting exclusively in black and white, using my beloved Nikon n2000 from the mid 1980’s through the end of the 1990’s (I did shoot color with it eventually!). I loved processing in the darkroom, and my favorite paper was ( and IS!) silver gelatin. What, you ask, is silver gelatin paper? It is light-sensitive photographic paper that has silver in its composition and a gelatin-coated surface. To me ( and many photographers), it creates the purest, truest black and white image available

I have continued to print my black and white images to silver gelatin, thanks to a lab near me that specializes in printing digital files in this traditional way. . The images are produced the old-fashioned way, using light and shadow to etch the image onto the paper, rather than creating black and white with various inks as other modern labs do now. The results are stunning. You can see one of my silver gelatin prints, “Daisy Series 5” through the end of March as part of the juried exhibition “An Artist’s Vision” at the Cape Cod Art Center in Barnstable, MA.
Blue skies,
Melanie