On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Steve from Mendocino
As a toddler, my elder daughter delighted in creating attractive shapes with colored blocks. My approach to photography is equivalent. I walk around my subjects until the elements align in a pleasing composition that’s really as much about shapes as it is about the essence of the subject itself. Black and white can accentuate the graphics of that composition, and, by concentrating on an isolated detail of the subject, once can make the photo pretty much solely about graphics rather than the subject as we think about it. This is what Brett Weston was so good at, and it is what I’ve tried to achieve in this set of pictures. All of these were taken in 1970-71.
This first picture is a burned-out mobile home that I found in a wrecking yard. The richness of the dark textures and their geometry is a favorite of mine. I have a very large print of this one hanging in my kitchen.
Curves and lines and textures. What’s not to like?
I know. It’s just a picture of a horse’s ass, but I enjoy the way the shapes dominate the concept of the carousel. I find most of my friends like this less than I do, but I offer it for those who might share my taste.
Not much to say about this one. Part of a long series taken in wrecking yards.
Can’t remember where I took this or what it was, but the sense of abandonment adds to the shapes in a nice way.
Detail of a car in a wrecking yard.
Detail of an old fence. This and the previous one really should have been taken on 2 and 1/4 or larger, but for a web post, it works
One of my favorite photographs. Culverts with some kind of a tank covered in asbestos in the foreground.
JPL
Your photos are amazing, but these are also spooky!
WereBear
I love these. My own approach to photography is similar: I am compositional.
Wag
Interesting compositions. It is great to have jackals pulling out their old prints. It was so challenging thinking about how colors would translate into b+w. It was especially fun pulling out the different filters for specific effects. Red filters to darken the blue sky was my favorite. Great photos!
I’m pissed st myself for leaving all my negatives behind in a divorce decades ago.
Albatrossity
Very nice! Some of these textures and forms are indeed images that Weston would have been proud to make!
randy khan
There was some point when I realized that many of Weston’s photos were all about the same things – the peppers, the dunes, and the nudes were about the light and shadows and shapes, not the subjects.
I particularly like the light fixture, by the way.
Mike in Oly
These are beautiful. I love taking photos of the textures I comes across in my hikes. Always on the lookout for good subjects.
cope
Though they are all good pictures, my vote is for the fence one. I almost got a splinter just looking at it.
Thanks.
Warren Senders
Wonderful work; the b&w images are classical in their abstract purity. I needed this beauty today…Thank you!
arrieve
These are fabulous — my favorite is the tires.
stinger
Wow, these are so pure and dramatic when stripped down to line, shape, and shadow. Amazing how much feeling can come through. Does it take a long time to train your eye to discard color when you look at objects?
SaltWaterCleanse
Thanks for sharing these pics Steve. They are all really cool. The hanging light is my favorite.
When I was a kid in the 70s our neighbors (teenagers at the time) were into photography. They always shot in black and white. We have a few prints left that they took of my me and my sisters and our big dog. Just casual pics they took for school assignments. The pics remain the best family pictures we have — and I swear they get better every year. Something about black and white…it can capture an abstract form or a human expression with such truth and poignancy.
JanieM
@randy khan: I too like the light fixture. If I scroll up continuously, it looks like the picture is slowly spinning.
The one with the wooden fence is also a favorite.
Caroln
I too love the light fixture – pure abstract expression. But the detail of the car in the wrecking yard drew me in – examining the mended hole, thinking about the person who did that, to the point where it looked like a sunflower.
Steve from Mendocino
@stinger: I got into black and white because the notion of controlling the alchemy of the whole process was intriguing for me as a teenager. I was mostly taking sports shots — football for the school paper and surf shots just to capture memories of what I liked best about summer. The adjustment to black and white happened automatically. The awareness of composition came later, especially when I started pointing toward art school. Soon, composition was all that mattered to me.
KSinMA
Nice photographs indeed. Thanks for sharing!