The brief said 'black and white, sun-drunk, a little feral,' which is the best brief I've ever gotten and also the vaguest. The photographer, Ali, shoots film and believes color is 'a crutch for cowards,' a thing he says while wearing head-to-toe beige. We spent one long Saturday proving you can drain every drop of color out of Los Angeles and it still looks like nowhere else on earth.
Here's what happens when you take the color away: the city turns into shapes. A striped bollard becomes a graphic exclamation point. A chain-link fence becomes lace. Palm trees, which in color are basically clip art, go monochrome and suddenly look prehistoric, all spike and shadow. And the light, the same brutal noon light I complain about constantly, stops being a temperature and becomes an architecture. You don't squint at it in black and white. You lean into it and let it carve.
The staircase shot nearly killed me, and I want that on the record. Ali found an exterior staircase behind a laundromat, handed me a stack of nine fashion magazines as a prop, and asked me to walk down in platform boots while looking 'unencumbered.' Nine magazines is roughly the weight of a toddler. The awning above me had a broken strut and kept dipping toward my head like it was taking bites. In the final frame I appear to be drifting downstairs on my way somewhere fabulous. In reality I am doing load-bearing math. That's the job: the picture gets the poetry, I get the forearm workout.
By four o'clock we'd migrated to a parking lot with a white retaining wall, and this is where the satin dress earned its keep. Satin in black and white does something color never lets you see: it stops being 'a nice dress' and becomes pure liquid light, every fold a brushstroke. Ali got quiet, which is how you know it's working. The wind came up off the lot, threw my hair sideways, and he burned half a roll in a minute. The frame where I'm mid-gust, hair horizontal, went in his portfolio, my portfolio, and eventually a gallery in Highland Park where it sold to a dentist.
I drove home at golden hour, the one moment this city goes amber and forgives you, and felt weirdly light. A whole day without color, and I hadn't missed it once. Then I stopped at a light on Sunset next to that pink wall, my pink wall, and it glowed at me like a radioactive marshmallow, and fine, yes, I missed it a little. Balance in all things. Even walls.