Color Snapshots

I love taking photographs. I have absolutely no training or formal education in photography. I'm not particularly good at it. But that doesn't stop me.

Actually, whenever someone shows me his fancy SLR camera and begins talking about exposures and f-stops and shutter speeds, my eyes start to glaze over. All I know is that I like taking photographs, that I take hundreds of them a month, that I take most of them with my phone and am fairly happy to keep doing so, and that Instagram is the most absorbing application ever invented. (Seriously. Add me, y'all.)

I was looking over my photos from 2011 last night and noticed something that should have been fairly obvious, if I'd been paying attention—but which really didn't seem apparent until I saw nearly a year's worth of thumbnails lined up in neat rows. All my photos from the early party of year are pretty typical shots of things that caught my fancy, or of my cats, or in the springtime, of all the floral life springing up in abundance in my old Michigan home. Nice, colorful stuff.

Then we get to June, when I moved. And suddenly I've got nothing but black-and-white studies of my new surroundings. Not just black-and-white photos. Moody black-and-white photos, with dark shadowy edges encroaching into the frame like special visual effects of doom left over from some Stephen King miniseries.

I have dozens and dozens of photographs of my local beach—pictures taken during the sunniest, greenest, warmest time of year, that look like the kind of thing Sylvia Plath would've clutched to her bosom as she stuck her head in the oven. They're the kind of photographs you might find in a newspaper with a byline reading The suicide victim, presumed deceased, was last spotted wading into the waters of this local beach during a dangerous high tide. Onlookers say his bathing suit may have been weighted with rocks. Or they simply should be wrapped in a note fashioned of cut-out letters that read, deer detectives, I burried the bodies here. hah! hah! hah! the fairfield killer.

No, really. I'm not exaggerating. I look at those photos now and I'm thinking, I took these in the summer? When it was nice? Double-tee-eff?

It's actually fairly funny how bleak this last summer looks, through my lens. I totally get it, though. On a day-to-day basis I might've been thinking, "Oh, I like these monochromatic studies. They're clean and simple." But throughout the entire summer I was really on a mindset of, "I don't want to be here. I don't like this place. It's never going to be anything to me."

If you look at my scrapbook of photos for the year, though, something happens right around the end of October. Suddenly my black-and-white photographs start to fade away—they don't vanish completely, mind you—but they're replaced by eye-popping, cornea-bleeding blasts of color. I'm not exaggerating that it could cause the unsuspecting scroller a serious case of visual whiplash. If you were to compare the photographs of the same subject, five months apart, I'd venture to say you wouldn't recognize them.

What happened recently to effect the change? It's tough to say. I think the actual realization came that this is my life now, and that I can't really pretend it isn't, when I was in the city recently. I was sitting at the Central Park Reservoir, one evening. I'd had a very long and leisurely and enjoyable day investigating a geeky board games store, and taking myself out to a solo lunch, and spending the afternoon at the museum. I had dinner and an evening with a new friend yet to come. I was standing there with a hot beverage in one hand and my phone in the other, snapping photos of the water and the sunset and admiring the colors while joggers huffed and panted and kicked up gravel with their running shoes behind me.

And suddenly it struck me: This doesn't have to be a special day. You could have a lot of future days this good.

It wasn't that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of her house into Technicolor. No, it wasn't that blatant or sudden. It was just at that moment I realized I'd been stumbling around for months like someone whose eyes have been badly sun-bleached, and that slowly, very slowly for weeks, I'd been seeing colors again.

So here's to the scarlets and lemon yellows, so vivid one could warm his hands over them. Here's the eye-popping greens and blues and indigos, the crimsons and oranges. Here's to the blacks and whites and thousands of shades of grays between, too. I could use them all in my life.