A few years back, probably pre-pandemic, I took a weekend workshop at Aperture with Rinko Kawauchi. She is a well known and highly respected photographic artist. I have been a fan of her work ever since seeing her book. “the eyes, the ears, “Photographs And Words.” back in 2005. For the workshop we were asked to bring a series of photographs from a project we are currently working on and I brought some images from my series, Up.

I must admit she did not seem very impressed. She said I had a talent for composing photographs which didn’t really tell me much. I none the less learned a lot from her giving advice to other students and talking about her own work. This is all a roundabout way of recalling a statement she once made (not at the workshop) about photography and her own work. She said, and I paraphrase badly, “in photography it’s not what you photograph that’s important rather it is how you photograph it.”

As I go back to shooting images for my Yellow Becomes Blue series her word’s are bouncing around my mind. As I approach a possible subject I try to image it’s colors inverted and how the tonalities of light (reversed) will splash on the image. Ordinary street photographs become otherworldly, almost alien.

I also like to think that the images make you realize the way we see the world is just one of many possible interpretations. We are limited by our evolution and biology. Other organisms see and sense the world differently. As they say, there is more than one way to skin a cat.