Black and White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. My purpose in taking photographs over the past forty years has ultimately been about defining myself. It has been fundamentally a psychological and existential journey.
In some ways I consider myself more Chinese, because I live in San Francisco, which is becoming a predominantly Asian city. I avoid falling into the black-and-white dialectic in which most of America still seems trapped. I have always recognized that, as an American, I am in relationship with other parts of the world; that I have to measure myself against the Pacific, against Asia. Having to think of myself in relationship to that horizon has liberated me from the black-and-white checkerboard.
The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day.
I think it's kind of human nature to always want to see these things as a competitive dynamic, that either technology companies have to win or the banks have to win and one of them is going to lose. It's not as black and white.
I had been doing wall drawings, but they were always black and white. Then in 1993 I painted all the walls of a room to make an installation and as soon as I saw the colour on the walls, it changed my whole life.
I did a club one night - the speakers were old as hell. My jokes were coming out in black and white.
Colonialism has a bad reputation in the modern context, but Colonial Africa was a far better place for both black and white before the colonists gave up.
My philosophy, like color television, is all there in black and white.
Freedom is a struggle, and we do it together. Not only together as black citizens, but black and white together.
There are bad people and there are bad corporations. Just as there are good people and good corporations. That might seem too black and white, but what can I tell ya?
When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.
All I demand for the black man is, that the white people shall take their heels off his neck, and let him have a chance to rise by his own efforts.
Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography.
Maybe black and white is the best medium for landscapes, I don't know.
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
I did pose for 'Black and White' magazine, a prestigious, artistic publication, several years ago. . . I did this as a piece of art and make no apologies for the creative decisions I've made as an artist in my 20-year career.
I shoot in black and white, sometimes color, sometimes if it looks good I shoot out the window of the airplanes or whatever, anything that - sometimes I secretly take secret photos, shoot video of people on the plane if it's not too crowded. I don't know, whatever comes up.
Something that is appealing is wars are terrible and ugly and hard and each conflict is different, but of every conflict I've ever gone to, I've also seen people being extraordinary in a good sense. It's not just a black and white extreme situation that pushes people to extremes and they do crazy bad stuff. You also see crazy brave stuff. You see humanity in a different light.
Let me speak frankly: separate but equal is a fraud. It is the language that tried to push Rosa Parks to the back of the bus. It is the motif that determined that black and white people could not possibly drink from the same water fountain, eat at the same table or use the same toilets.
We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn't. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them.