I love black and white photography. I personally feel you get more color in black and white photography than you do in color photography. If a photographer is hearing this, they’ll understand what I mean. It’s the contrast. Contrasts in black and white, I think, are rich and beautiful. And sometimes I like to draw the faces with these contrasts and half tones, because to me it actually can bring in more detail than if you put it in color. So that’s deliberate. I will do it as if this is a photograph. And then the patterns of their clothes are almost an independent art that has to do with the overall composition. But their faces are these wonderful black and white images.
The Keeping Quilt, for instance, was done entirely in black and white, except for the quilt. And the origin of the quilt — anybody’s clothes that went into that quilt — their clothes were in color, so the children could understand that this is what eventually ended up in this quilt. Sometimes I will do it for a reason. In Betty Doll, the entire book was in black and white, except for the doll. So I guess I use it as a technique to say to a child, “This is the focus, but here’s the story around it.”
