Back in February, Steven Lawson, a gent I follow on Mastodon, had a brainstorm to start up a Monochrome March movement. The idea, as he put it, was for anyone interested in participating to post monochrome photos that were newly taken.
I immediately knew I was going to join in.
I told him that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to offer up anything every day — beyond my sporadic work schedule and other general busyness, I wanted this to be fun and didn’t want to have it feel like an obligation — but I pretty quickly found that posting the #MonochromeMarch images daily wasn’t going to be a particular problem.
What I found, as I had suspected would happen, was that I would start looking at everything around me with an open enough mind to think that anything anywhere could be an inspiration. The rough bark of a tree offered great variation in depth of lighting effects. A thin sheet of ice was a fuzzy mirror of what was around and above it. The swirls in a sheet of one good side plywood were smoothed ripples of shades.
As per usual with my photos, I didn’t want to stage anything. Everything I shot would be something I’d come across in its natural state.
And as per usual with my photos, I’d only want to use filters if needed to help the image become what it actually looked like. Photographs are so often not true to what you’d seen in person, and rather than just accept that, I’d come to realize some years back that I wouldn’t mind applying filters to images that I took if it helped them become what they were meant to be.
As it was with all of these images, they almost never required much tweaking at all. I’d occasionally want to muck around with the contrast more to have something pop out a bit from its original look — a spiraled, faintly beige leaf sitting on top of other more common dead leaves doesn’t work as well in monochrome as it does in colour — so the images were sometimes helped a bit to make them work.
But most of them were changed very little.
It turned out that not only did I have enough content to offer up every day, but I’d often have to sort through numerous options to choose among which were the best ones to use. A single, short ride on a train would give me days worth of imagery content.
I told myself as an added self-imposed limitation that I would also not go out of my way to find images. Toronto is a hugely diverse city as far as feels of environment go. We have a dense, bustling concrete and glass downtown core, a ton of urban streets ranging from several million dollar homes to post-war bungalows with slowly collapsing homemade garages, to seedy inner-city areas where you probably don’t want to be after dark, to huge parks and conservation areas.
Driving around to find good photos would offer up too much material. So I determined that if it meant so much as walking back to take a great shot I’d missed because the dog was pulling me along too fast on our walk that morning, I wouldn’t do it. These were all going to be what I could naturally find in the moment on my daily routines. All the more reason to keep my mind open as much as I could to what could be something interesting.
It only proved to be a bit more challenging as the month wore on. As we all tend to do, I was more about my day-to-day patterns as experiencing new and different things — going about more or less the same walking options with the dog, driving the same route to the same job, etc. — so there wasn’t as much new presenting itself that I could use.
So I don’t know that I was as happy with what I was offering up in the last few days of March as what I was posting earlier in the the month. But with the commitment to myself to post something new every day, it also weeded out the nasty tendency for looking for perfection (which everyone wouldn’t agree on anyway) and pushing back on my loud self-criticism (I’m learning that “Is it good enough?” is a very ambiguous statement when it comes to artistic pursuits anyway) to simply take what I had to offer and set it free. I think both Amie McNee and Mel Robbins would approve of my newly burgeoning mindset.
I was also constantly reminding myself to not chase the Likes and Boosts on Mastodon. It’s always nice when people like what you’re doing. But this had always been meant primarily as a challenge to myself, even with needlessly self-imposed limitations to make it what I wanted it to be. One of those had been to not post anything too similar over the month. So even if a handful of people did like what I’d posted, I couldn’t — I wouldn’t — try to recreate that external win with posting something like that again. Every day’s photo was going to be fundamentally different from every other photo.
That again doubled down on my determination to keep my eyes peeled for what around me could work as a new, different view that I hadn’t already tried to capture before.
And that in turn opened up my mind to how much is around us all the time that could be considered art if we’d only look at it that way. A bin of half-round wood trim in the bin of a hardware store. A maker’s stamp of certification on safety glass in a train. The light and shadow from arcing skylights in a mall…
I had a lot of fun taking part in this, and will almost certainly join in again if it happens next year, and there’s no reason to think it won’t. There’s also an ongoing #MonochromeMondays series on Mastodon that I may toss occasional photos into, as well.
And while I’m by no means limiting myself to taking just monochrome photos from now on, there’s a unique way to look at the world when you’re intending to capture it in that specific way that I also don’t want to lose sight of. Maybe it’ll just become part of how I look at things from now on. With a less narrow view. A less humdrum, day-to-day outlook. And more often start asking myself if anything around me could make a good shot.
After all, opening yourself up to share more art in more ways isn’t a bad way to live.
