I photographed this stretch of the Nā Pali coast from above, then took away the color. That choice makes your eye work differently. Instead of reading green cliffs against blue ocean, you begin following the cuts and folds in the land: one ridge catching light, the next falling nearly black, small pale beaches pressed against the base of an enormous wall.
The brightest water sits far from the dark central ridges. I like the distance between those things. Your eye moves over the mountain’s rough surface, drops toward the coast, and then finds the sea carrying the light away from it.
Black and white can sound like a way of simplifying a place. Here it did something else for me. It made the complexity harder to pass over. The photograph asks you to notice the shape of the terrain before naming its colors. I keep discovering new seams in the cliffs each time I return to it.
The photograph asks you to notice the shape of the terrain before naming its colors.
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