Josiah had tried to explain it once, to a stranger on a night train to Baltimore. He'd been drunk and she'd been beautiful, with the kind of Mona Lisa face that might have been exquisitely ugly under any other light. He'd wanted to take her picture right then and there. He'd wanted to pin her down in that moment and make her understand.

So, black and white, was what he'd said to her. He only shot in black and white. But what she needed to know was that it wasn't his father's black and white, the rigidity, the often brutal simplification of the complex. It was the opposite. It was colour film, he'd told her, that embalmed its subjects on paper. Monochrome left room for mystery, for subtle shades of grey. For texture.

And the girl, Carla or Chloe, had nodded politely, and wiped her pretty hands on her blue skirt. Then she'd looked out into the aisle. Maybe she had even gotten up and sat elsewhere. The memory is hazy. That was back in his drinking days.

Josiah doesn't drink so much anymore, but he still takes his pictures in black and white. His camera is a 1959 Polaroid, handed down to him on his fourteenth birthday when twenty-five dollars was enough to buy his old man a brand-new colour job.

These days the motor runs slow, and it's a treasure hunt just to keep the dinosaur primed, and he thinks sometimes about replacing it - with a sleeker model, or even with a digital camera.

When it breaks, he's promised himself. When it breaks.

And still he knows that no one has ever truly seen the ocean until they've seen it shot through an old clunker of a black and white Polaroid. There's a truth there in the puzzle of grey. A beauty.

This, now: this is his favourite. This is a portrait of Ezra, in black and white, taken a few months before Josiah began to fall a little in love with him. The 4th of July barbecue at the Travis ranch, a long hot Saturday.

It was that twilight hour between supper and the fireworks, and the rest of the boys were with Orrin, looking over the new stock. Josiah had just finished up helping Evie with the dishes; picked up his camera from the counter on his way out to the barns.

In this picture Ezra is just as he happened upon him, perched on a corner of the porch rail with one leg bent, the other dangling down. The sunlight is low, coming straight down the western valley; it burns like silver along the line of Ezra's leg. His shorts are bunched against the railing, riding up his thigh. His t-shirt is untucked, and the shadows fall just so it seems you could tilt the photo and see all the way up his bare back.

Against the creamy grey of Ezra's skin is the darker line of a scar; the cut of his cheekbone.

In life what you notice about Ezra are his green eyes, the movement of his mouth, the red-gold highlights in his hair. But here in black and white there is only the tension in his limbs, the hunch of his shoulders and the line of one frowning eyebrow as he squints into the burning sun. The strange pose that always makes Josiah picture how his own body would fit around it.

They had spent all that day at the ranch; poured hours into riding and cooking and shootin' the shit. But looking at the picture, you can tell Ezra is already leaving this place, putting it behind him, gazing restlessly into just another sunset, as if like Lot - or some old-movie cowboy - the whole world would be lost if he dared look back.

Ezra - gorgeous, charming, facile Ezra - thinks he and Josiah could hardly be more different. He's wrong of course. They only carry their loneliness differently, or so Josiah believes.

Josiah makes no secret of his own aloneness. He stands behind his brothers, observing, listening, always there to catch them. Always hoping someone will turn around and see. Ezra, on the other hand, seems to drag his isolation with him into the centre of every crowd. He laughs and jokes and seizes conversation...but he only lends himself; he never gives freely. He never stays, he never puts down roots. He rides off into the sunset, too cagey to make camp, and life drifts by him like tumbleweeds.

It is a picture Josiah often returns to: the two of them in a moment where only they existed. Ezra in black and white, already eager to be gone; and Josiah, behind the camera, absent from the picture, as if he wasn't there at all.