John Rosenthal
For most of my career I made photographs using black-and-white film. I liked the compositional demands of black-and-white—for without an architecture to hold the image together, a black-and-white photograph falls apart. Looking at the world in shades of gray is to limit yourself—to risk doing without the simple pleasure of seeing colors. But it forces you to think about the structure of your photograph.
In 2007 however I began to work with color film and to print my photographs digitally. For awhile I resisted the idea of digital printing, but I soon realized that working with a good file in Photoshop gave me a lot more time to delineate the complexity of my negative. Suddenly, instead of printing for 30-60 seconds, I could spend a day working with every part of the negative. And I began to photograph in color because my subject at the time, the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, required it. Katrina had flooded the neighborhood and driven its inhabitants elsewhere. Black-and-white photographs would have emphasized the grim physical reality of the Ninth Ward—but that wasn’t my intention. I wanted to capture the actual loved space that had been abandoned, a working-class neighborhood in which color often functioned as a bright antidote to economic scarcity.
