Black and white really is the superior way to make photographs. The color’s never right, so realism’s out. Really you oughta just make it as beautiful as possible, and nothing’s really as beautiful as black and white.
Photography’s for seeing what you don’t usually, and we see in color most of the time anyways.
Lifting rocks makes the world seem black and white, just for a little bit. I’ve been rereading Sun & Steel by Yukio Mishima for the fourth or fifth time, and I think he’d agree. Something about the labor of it, the sweat and the exhaustion and the pain, the focus of it cleanses. It purifies and winnows; to him and to me it’s through that winnowing that real beauty can be got to.
He was a big fan of steel, obviously. Of traditional if somewhat antiquated weight lifting and body building.
Photography’s for seeing what you don’t usually, and we see in color most of the time anyways.
Lifting rocks makes the world seem black and white, just for a little bit. I’ve been rereading Sun & Steel by Yukio Mishima for the fourth or fifth time, and I think he’d agree. Something about the labor of it, the sweat and the exhaustion and the pain, the focus of it cleanses. It purifies and winnows; to him and to me it’s through that winnowing that real beauty can be got to.
He was a big fan of steel, obviously. Of traditional if somewhat antiquated weight lifting and body building.
He’d’ve likely critiqued it as being bumpkin-esque, simple-minded, childish.
In an age where hope for Industrial man was not foolish, at a time when organized human society at the scale of billions was not understood to be largely a farce, Mishima made a bit more sense.
Today rocks are what’s clever.![]()
He was cosmopolitan and I am not.
As he liked his bodies purified so too did he prefer his flooring and his spaces. Carrying rocks over uneven and slippery ground further distracts the front of the mind, it works to purify and to make the carrier one with the earth they hold and traverse.In an age where hope for Industrial man was not foolish, at a time when organized human society at the scale of billions was not understood to be largely a farce, Mishima made a bit more sense.
Today rocks are what’s clever.
