Kaya Olsen

May 25, 2021

White is the presence of all color

I love black/white photography. There is something beautifully simple about breaking an image down into a color palette of grays. Add a little contrast, turn up the highlight a bit, accentuate a certain shade of gray and you have a picture that's beautiful and simple.

Interestingly enough, however, nothing in life is black and white like that. And interestingly enough too, that's what fascinates me the most about life. All the nuances. All the damn nuances. That aren't always pretty and aren't always simple. That make life so confusing and complicated.

Black and white is easy to handle. It's a world of yes and no; of right and wrong; of high and low. How easy wouldn't it be if life would be like that? Clarity and certainty in everything we do, and no dealing with the complex mess of human nature and psyche. I know a man who only dreams in black and white. Imagine that!

I try hard to avoid thinking in such dualities by approaching life, and especially people, as a piece of artwork, as a painting – full of details, nuances, colors, and the history of its creation. I study artwork from a mindset of curiosity and exploration, trying to uncover the nuances – and what those nuances do with me. This means I never have the answers. I never have clarity. I never have beautiful simplicity. Instead, I have curiosity and exploration. It's chaotic, but it also feels more fair towards life, for who am I to know? I only know that I don't know anything, to cite Sokrates. 

It's a mess. But it's the mess that attracts me to art and convinced me to be an artist. It is an endless process of having my comfort zone, my capacity for uncertainty and my compassion challenged. It's exhausting at times, exhilarating at times, but most importantly; it's real.