Simone Signoret (1921-1985)

Once during a Naropa Institute lecture, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche casually remarked that Tibetan Buddhism is to Zen Buddhism as technicolor is to black-and-white. Soon after that I saw a group of magpies on a lawn somewhere, and they became Zen birds for me right on the spot. I still have a nice little Zen moment very time I see a magpie.

I grew up at a time when black-and-white was the norm in movies and photographs, and for me, early color movies seemed phony and artificial and much less realistic than their b&w counterparts. My father had a candy store right next to a movie theater half-owned by my uncle, so I got to ‘go to the pictures’ a lot when I was a kid. All those mesmerizing images on the gigantic screen just a few feet away (it was standard for little kids to sit in the first or second row). No sex play, of course, and not all that much violence either. If a guy got shot in a cowboy movie, he fell down and that was it, and there was no blood anywhere to be seen.

But quite often beauty loomed up there on the screen, particularly the heterosexualizing kind for many young males, great close-ups of beautiful women. And now we know that being a sucker for a pretty face starts almost as soon as we get slapped into breathing on our own: “Newborn babies prefer to look at attractive faces, says a UK researcher, suggesting that face recognition is hardwired at birth, rather than learned. Alan Slater and his colleagues at the University of Exeter showed paired images of faces to babies as young a[s] one day old and found that they spent more time fixated on the more attractive face. ‘Attractiveness is not in the eye of the beholder, it’s innate to a newborn infant,’ says Slater.”

Actually all this is an excuse to post the photo of the actress Simone Signoret above. Color is sensuous and seductive, but it might be that the bare bones of black-and-white can more incisively suggest the essence of things by abstracting color away. Certainly black and white, dark and light, are in many ways the foundational yin and yang of photography and much of our visual experience. In any case, here’s a question for you: would you prefer to see this photo in color?