The Art of Seeing Life in Monochrome. Ilford - Delta 4000
Black and white are inseparable; each gives the other its meaning. The Tao Te Ching reminds us, “Being and non-being create each other; difficult and easy support each other.” So it is with human souls — we are defined not only by those who resemble us, but by those whose thoughts, traditions, and ways of living seem foreign to our own.
The world’s beauty lies in its contrasts. Every person unlike you carries a library of experiences you will never live, values you may never have chosen, and joys you might never have imagined. To encounter them is to borrow their eyes for a moment, to see the familiar made strange, and the strange made familiar. As Carl Jung observed, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
If the world were made only of what is familiar to you, life would lose its shape. Without contrast, perception itself collapses — just as colour becomes meaningless without its opposite. White is luminous only because black stands beside it; joy is profound because sorrow has been tasted; meaning exists because there are moments that feel meaningless.
Who I am is not solely the work of my own hands — it is sculpted, refined, and sometimes broken apart by those who are not like me. Without them, I would be a flat image without depth, a melody without harmony, a garden of a single flower. They bring shadows that make my light visible, flavours that sharpen my taste for life, and questions that disturb my certainty into growth.
To see the mortal world through another’s eyes is not simply an act of empathy — it is a kind of liberation. You escape the narrow prison of your own perspective, discovering that your truth is not the only truth, and perhaps not even the truest. As Marcus Aurelius wrote, “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
In the end, it is not sameness that completes us, but the endless dance between the familiar and the foreign, the known and the unknown. That dance is life’s great teacher — and the reason our world is worth living in.
Nikon FM3A - Ilford HP5 - 400
