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Where's the colour in black and white? - We Are OCA

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Where's the colour in black and white?

One Sunday afternoon around the time I was first getting into photography, I took set of black and white 10” x 8” black and white photographs, which I had laboriously printed in the darkroom at a community arts space, to show off to my grandparents. I was proud with what I had achieved, although I’m sure the tonal contrast was flat, they were covered with specks of dust, and by now I’m sure the prints are brown and stink of hypo because I didn’t wash them properly. So, when my grandpa looked at them and was clearly at a loss as to what an appropriate response should be, I was disappointed. “Don’t you like them?” I said. His response stumped me as abruptly as my pictures had appeared to disarm him: “Well…” he replied “…they’re ok; but there’s no colour in them!”
 
I don’t remember what exchanges took place after that; needless to say I had no idea whatsoever of how to make sense of this observation. It was an archetypical philistine remark, yet somehow it was kind of profound. Clearly the monochrome image was not enough for him; simply the bare bones of a picture, that needed some fleshy colour.

Hiroshi Sugimoto: Couleurs de L’Ombre
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Couleurs de L’Ombre



I wish I could say that my grandpa’s desire for colour imagery over black and white put him amongst the progressive documentary photographers like Shore, Eggleston, Reas, Graham, Parr, Fox, etc. etc. and reflected the shifting attitudes amongst art institutions which have resulted in the superiority (in terms of popularity) of colour photography as the aesthetic mode of choice for both contemporary fine art and documentary practitioners. But sadly not. However, I think his position reflects a vox populi (not that colour = arty, because monochrome still wins that contest); that colour = more understanding.  Production companies and broadcasters have delighted us with recently discovered and re-mastered historic colour moving image footage; marketing them in such a way that the material offers a re-imagining of a historical narrative. The Second World War, and the Nazis are old favourites. See Channel 4’s series Hitler’s Rise: The Colour Films and LIFE’s feature here. I have to admit I have fallen for this kind of mystification. Recently, looking through the US Library of Congress photo archive, I must say that I found exploring the collection of colour photos from the Farm Security Administration did somehow put a different light on my understanding of a chapter of history that I did not know had been documented with colour film.
 
Chopping cotton on rented land near White Plains, Greene County, Ga. 1941
Jack Delano: Chopping cotton on rented land near White Plains, Greene County, Ga. 1941. Courtesy of the US Library of Congress

What colour adds – or perhaps detracts – from monochrome (and vice versa) has perhaps, thanks to a passing remark from a bumphled relative, been on my mind for the about 15 years. But having said that, I wasn’t particular excited with the theme of this year’s Rencontres – ‘Arles in Black’ [and white] – which addressed the significance or importance, or perhaps even the relevance, of black and white photography today. Aren’t there more pressing questions for such an important event? One of the concerns I had was that such a theme would lead to an extensive ‘dusting-off’ of older (but hardly newly discovered) bodies of work and shoehorning them uncomfortably into a contemporary context. Not all of my pre-conceptions materialised in my experience of the festival. I think one body of work that highlighted the subversive potential of monochrome was Paulo Nozolino’s photographs, which gave a sense of the industrialization of lavender cultivation in Provence, questioning the picturesque myth with which we are all so familiar.
Paulo Nozolino
Paulo Nozolino

Gallerists and publishers are keen to play upon the novelty of colour when announcing the discovery of unknown colour works, or the ‘first’ colour works by a photographer who previously has been know only for their black and white pictures. It’s as if they are trying to grasp at something like the moment when Bob Dylan emerged on stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 with a buzzing Stratocaster. (Sadly I’m plagiarising this analogy, but I can’t recall from whom. Any answers of the true author would be gratefully received.) Tony Ray Jones’s recent American Colour: 1962 – 1965 is a classic example of this. (In William Eggleston’s Before Colour we can see this process in reverse.) If I appear cynical, it’s not a problem I have with the actual photographs (far from it), but a desire for a greater understanding of kind of mythologizing.
 
There felt like such an effort with Hiroshi Sugimoto’s project Couleurs de L’Ombre [Colours of the Shade] that was installed at the Église Saint-Blaise. Similar to Dylan’s die hard folk fans, although I didn’t find myself chanting ‘Judas’, I did kind of mutter it; not because he had transgressed to the ‘dark side’ of colour photography, but because of the highly problematic and conflicting ideologies that this installation presented.
 
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Couleurs de L’Ombre
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Couleurs de L’Ombre

I apologise for the lengthiness of this post, but there is clearly a lot more that could be said on the topic. So rather than rambling on, I’d like to turn it over to you:
 
What is the difference for you between colour and black and white photography?


Posted by author: Jesse

47 thoughts on “Where's the colour in black and white?

  • At the “Museum für Gestaltung” in Zürich an exhibition in honour of Magnum photographer René Burri’s 80th birthday just closed. It was called A Double Life and showed, next to the b/w pictures he is famous for, a largely unknown body of colour photographs he took secretly all along his career. In an interview he says that no self-respecting photographer would have dared to admit that he was actually taking colour photographs until very recently – the double life referring to his carrying along a second camera with which he experimented in colour, of course.
    Your article reminded me of this – the trap for me (is it just me?) is that the idea that black and white photographs are more indicative of serious art is so pervasive. And even after Fontcuberta’s “Sputnik” I still believe b/w photographs to be authentic much more readily than any colour photographs. (Going through my assignments a few weeks ago of all the courses I finished, I noted that I seem to have got consistently better feedback for assignments handed in in black and white, but that’s another story.)
    Even after 3 years of studying with OCA I cannot make up my mind if I am going to be a “colour” or “black and white” photographer. Will I have to decide? Thanks for your article – it did not provide any answers but at least I can see that my unresolved question is alive….

    • Hi Mijam,
      Thanks for you thoughts (I still have an e-mail from you which deserves attention – I;m sorry!). Yes Rene Burri is a great photographer and I’ve seen a little of his colour work, but I didn’t know he was so passionate about it.
      I certainly don’t think anyone needs to decide whether they are a black and white o a colou photographer, but I have met plenty of photographers (at all levels) who do feel this peculiar necessity to take one particular ‘side’. I haven’t done any (analogue) black and white photography for ages, but it is a compulsion! It’s great to be able to take control over the process in a way that very different to colour analogue photography.

  • For me, it is very simple. The world I see is in colour and that is always my starting point for any image that I make. For me, also, because I have come to photography in that last few years, I do not feel influenced (burdened?) by an idea that serious art photography must be black and white. I’m not sure whether anyone has sought to measure this, and I certainly haven’t – but I’m pretty confident that the majority of serious contemporary art-based photography will be in colour. So I am certainly influenced by that perception, to an extent. That said, if there is a sound reason why an image should be created or presented in black and white, then so be it – but it would not, for me, because it was necessary in order for it to be serious or art.
    Then, to be a bit controversial, but also to admit the truth, when I see a black and white contemporary photograph, my first thought is likely to be ‘dated’ and/or ‘nostalgic’. There may be good reasons for seeking to create that reaction, of course.

    • I think your comments strike a chord with me, Stan. The photography that I have generally been around has been in colour, but I remember my early impressions with photography being punctuated with 10×8 black and white prints in various places, and these were somehow special – perhaps just because of their novelty.
      As I think you suggest, nowadays, if a photograph is ‘presented’ in black and white then in most cases one can assume that the photographer has made a very conscious decision to convert it from a colour file, which suggests intent – even if it’s mis-intent!

  • Personally I think on the whole the mythologising doesn’t come from photographers but from those on the periphery who don’t fully appreciate the technical processes involved.
    As students in the early 70s the big plus with B&W was the control it offered. You could control the entire process expressively from the beginning to the end in your bathroom, if you weren’t fortunate enough to have access to a darkroom.
    Even if you had access to a colour darkroom it was a much more mechanical, intractable and expensive process producing a colour print, with much fewer options for control and to exploit in personalisation. Transparency as the finished article of course offered little control at all post exposure, bar pushing it a bit to warm it up or rarely pulling it to cool it down.
    Therefore B&W was the medium of choice for controlling one’s own quality to the standard one aspired to. Also one mustn’t forget that film was less forgiving to work with than digital and B&W offered more picture taking opportunities, particularly in this country with its often poor light where unnecessary colour could make an image look dreary when the colour was irrelevant to the intent or be hampering because of the generally lower ASA speeds of colour as compared to B&W for similar quality.
    Apart from that aspect I would give B&W props in that it consists entirely of what the light draws on the film. Whereas with colour film the colour is already effectively in the film substrate so in that sense the colour is as false as colour infrared film. That was a property which one could exploit by using different emulsions for different purposes as they each had their own characteristic colour palette.
    Of course this is a historical analysis. Irrespective of what I think the myths have been generated and woven and have to be addressed. At least with digital we don’t have to make the choice on a technical basis, so that’s dealt with, it’s the cultural weight that’s placed on either medium that’s the baggage that has to be contended with, rightly or wrongly.
    As Stan says B&W can immediately raise notions of nostalgia, perhaps even read as a political wedding to old values.
    I think my only test is what works, what feels appropriate on a case by case basis. Very often you can’t separate content from presentation. If the choice is reasoned then a portion of the audience might be able to read that reasoning.

  • Hi Jesse,
    I’m not a photography student, but I take a lot of photographs. And sometimes I switch the setting to B&W or even sepia.
    So here’s my layperson’s response:-
    I love colour, and am always looking for strong, vibrant or unusual colour combinations that might later inspire a painting – so most of my photos feature some colour ‘surprise’.
    But I do quite often switch to monochrome if the shapes and textures feel more important than the colours. For example when I went to Angkor Wat in Cambodia I took a lot of B&W photos to capture the textures of the temples more sharply. The relief bad carvings came out more clearly. (Works for faces too!).

    • Thanks Carol, your response captures what I would have said too. It is sensible to be pragmatic rather than entrenched, and pick the right medium for the job in hand.

    • Thank you for your perspective, Carol. Yes, I think monochrome can often lead the viewer to the form in a way that colour might distract from. Many find that the abstraction of monochrome can lead to a slowing-down of the viewer’s interaction with the image, potentially allowing a thoughtful and meaningful exchange. Of course, sometimes things just look better in monochrome!

  • I have wondered about the mythologizing of monochrome quite a lot recently, like many of my age black and white was the only real option for an amateur. As Clive says the bathroom provided arena for the magic that emanated from the developing dish for a couple of generations before digital printing came along and broke that spell. Our generation’s past was depicted in a series of grey tones, its manifest abstraction from reality was never considered to be an issue – it was what it had ever been. I, and most of the photographic world had never developed colour film – it was, and perhaps more so now, almost lunacy to try! Black and white photography was a democratising process. That there is now a generation emerging who will never encounter what is euphemistically called traditional photography, and can wield, with a switch a vaster array of pre-canned aesthetically diverse depictions of a scene and is seen by some as wonder to be applauded and by others as anathema to be sneered at.
    For my generation black and white photography was the standard by which we gauged the world, reportage was presented in graphic half tone and the modernists kept trying to out process each other to render an image more and more beautiful; though some might say with less and less depth. However these photographers could, and I think can still do, envisage what the view in the finder will look like in shades of grey and not be confused by the tones of colour. So it is about intent, colour photography has now been with us for almost as long as black and white was on its own, there are many choices to be made about aesthetic and image rendition is as important as any other. It will also be used as a gimmick as much as all the ‘phone App’s’ will allow.
    Jesse, I think that your choice of making 8” X 10” photographs as a start to your photographic journey a trifle precocious, most of us started with a 35mm camera! But I can only agree with you on Sugimoto, I thought in Arles it was a case of the sublime to the cash register.

    • “precocious”? “moi”! – no I meant 10 x 8 enlargements from 35mm – not 10×8 contact prints. Although I wish I had been. A different matter altogether, but I recall my first college workshop with the large format camera and wishing that it had been used to introduce me to how a camera functions, because it is all there…

  • Not intended as a facetious point – but I can’t help wondering why none of the worlds great paintings are B&W. The artists seem to have no trouble emphasising form in colour.
    The perceived documentary veracity of monochrome photos seems to me a hang over from a past when nothing else existed, much like the perceived objectivity of photography in general.
    To address the Jesse’s original question – the difference for me is that colour photography provides the largest sub-set of the image information. In a black and white the photographer has deliberately chosen to omit some information. This should be a reminder to ask ourselves two things: why, and what else.

    • A good point Nigel, I too also thought on the same lines. I would assume that by most, Picasso is/was considered a great painter whom produced some great paintings in his career. His main body of work is indeed a wondrous mix of colours, yet he also amassed an interesting body of black & white paintings:
      http://web.guggenheim.org/exhibitions/picasso/artworks
      Regarding photography, it is as you said ‘when nothing else existed’. Photography was born out of science and was governed by its technological limitations. I wonder though what photography would be like today if Niépce invented colour photography?
      One thing though no selective desaturation…!!! either B&W or colour not an amalgamated mess of the two.

      • Thanks Russell – I did wonder if I was simply exposing my lack of knowledge and am slightly reassured by the knowledge that Picasso was painting after the invention of photography so would have been exposed to the world in monochrome.
        Another thing that strikes me from your link is that the B&W pictures in the link seem to me qualitatively different from the coloured monotones. Not really sure why this should be – but it is worth remembering that we can choose coloured monotones as well as grey ones if we need them.

        • I hope i’m not overgeneralising but I think that most painters are used to seeing in monochrome – drawings are often done that way, also traditionally some painters paint a monochrome underpainting then add the colour over that. So its quite usual for artists to be able to transcribe the world of colour into monochrome, in fact for me it was much easier to do that than mix up all those paints.
          I’m not sure if you could argue that we see shadow and light in a different way than we do colour?
          Anyway I wanted to add to the colour vs b&w debate by mentioning Alec Soth’s broken manual, which includes photographs in colour and in b&w, I’ve seen some of the b&w ones as colour versions too. So for me, as I am greedy… I want to be free to use both depending on what seems appropriate for what i’m working on.

    • I have been thinking about this all day and you have summed it up perfectly for me Amano. Given a choice I prefer to work in mono and get annoyed when asked to justify why.

      • But there’s a difference between justifying and explaining. If a photographer chooses to omit some information from their image surely it’s legitimate to ask why. It seems entirely analogous to asking a landscaper why they left out the pylons.

    • Well I’m not sure at all that black and white is easier, in fact I would say that to get it right is at least as difficult. The level of artifice it could be argued is entirely similar, all colour tones are only an approximation after all. If the image is right for colour, and has a purpose that suits, then colour it should be, the same is true for monochrome, whether warm toned, cold toned or cyanotype. The aesthetic choice needs to be informed by the intent of the artist. Saying monochrome leaves something out which needs to be explained is like saying, I use a nine colour ink set and anything less would be an affront and needing an explanation.
      The mythologies surrounding monochrome seem not to want to expire, a bit like old Rodinal really…….

      • My experience is also that b/w is not easier – rather that for different subjects it appears to be working better. Often I prefer portraits eg., or winter landscapes where snow, ice or fog are predominant in black and white. But not always. Deciding in advance to take either colour or black and white has been a helpful practise, as it makes me more aware of the aesthetic component of how I want to express whatever it is I am making a picture of.

      • Who is saying it is easier !?
        I have been advised not to make greyscales but to retain the colour in the background since this can be used to apply tonal variation.
        The black and white photo has less information and that is surely welcome in our time of information overload.

  • Photography is a performance art. We invite the viewer to look and they experience our work on many levels. There are less notes being played in a string quartet than a forty strong orchestra by choice of the composer but there isn’t any less to be appreciated as a result of the reduced sound gamut (if there is such a thing).

      • But is it? A composer starts with 4′ 33″ and adds instruments as they head towards Wagner. A photographer more often starts with Wagner and removes instruments – or in the case of colour the whole string section – to get to their final position.
        The invention of colour film and more particularly digital sensors changed the equation – we are not Atget – he had no choice – we have to make a concious decision to ditch the colour. No-one is suggesting that B&W photographs are less artistic, but to invert the other Nigel’s proposal, it is legitimate to ask why they should be considered more artistic or more true than colour.

        • To head towards a composer who wouldn’t conduct Mendelssohn without wearing gloves is an interesting analogy Nigel; well I’ll take Cage anyday 🙂 .
          I can quite understand asking the question regarding the mythologising of Atget, much the same as many of Szarkowski’s ‘super stars’ whose connoisseurship of the tawdry has always left me somewhat bemused (ack’ Rosler).
          Is anyone suggesting the black and white is intrinsically more artistic than colour? Some photographers choose it because they find it expresses their point of view with greater clarity. Others choose colour, some choose film others digital, some choose a light box others digital projection – all for the same reasons and on and on…

  • @jsumb
    In fairness I chose Atget as a simple example of someone who had no choice. The point I was trying to make – badly, because I introduced art – is that removing information from the picture is a concious decision. I don’t really agree with your ink set analogy – all but the black have been removed, not just one colour.If the photographer has removed colour, what else might they remove to make their point? Why is that not a fair question?
    A bit of over zealous dodging and burning causes an outcry in the World Press Photos, but a digital image with all the colour removed is seen as some measure of truthfulness and in some places as artiness. I don’t understand.

  • Atget didn’t like the monochrome prints he made either he toned them 😉 and not to just stabilise them. Outcries in photo competitions are part and parcel of ‘the game’, if you enter competitions and are caught out breaking the ‘rules’ then it’s a fair cop! (I thought it was an imported sky, but I may be mistaken).
    The ‘artiness’ you refer to is about the mythologizing of the aesthetic; just because it’s black and white doesn’t make it ‘arty’, it is ‘Art’ if it has been created by an artist and hung in a gallery or somesuch. If the artist only printed in light cyan and called it ‘Art’ then it would be ‘Art’. If he decided not to use any inks at all and called it ‘Art’ it would be so, if he decided to expose photographic paper and fix the latent image of random light it would be ‘Art’ if he decided it was. Mikhailov, like many other artists, choose to work in both – none of it easy viewing, but I don’t think he has felt the need to explain the absence of anything.

    • I was thinking of this one: http://www.worldpressphoto.org/awards/2013/spot-news/paul-hansen.
      I agree that black and white does not make it art – but that’s not the common perception, which is what I’m questioning. I suspect Mikhailov could explain, if he so chose, why he sometimes worked in one medium and sometimes the other. Given that I can’t ask him, I can still ask the question when looking at his images.
      PS toning and monochrome – you say potato I say potato, you say tomato I say tomato etc 😉

  • Atget made a choice not to be a painter but that may have been because he wasnt very good at it. In our town at the moment we have an art exhibition. It is open to all media and 70+ pieces were selected to be hung in the 3 spaces of the arts centre. The winning work was a photograph (£2000 so worth a try next year) and it is colour. Not much colour. It is almost monochrome within a gamut of light blues and greens and works very well. There are a number of other photographs selected to be hung but none are monochrome so maybe the myth is exhausted and the selectors (from The Lowry etc) have had enough of it. Anyway I remove all sorts of stuff from my photographs, especially those I send to Alamy. Rejection due to dust bunnies is legitimate but when they are birds its not fair. So, any birds get the clone now, sorry.

    • You have my sympathy on bird cloning. The little black smudges make me twitchy every time I see them. At least they aren’t midges. I did a series of aircraft contrail photos once and they were all unusable because of the clouds of midges I hadn’t noticed.

  • Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s essay, “Canon Fodder: Authoring Eugene Atget,” in Photography at the Dock (1991) gives a rather different take on Atget…well worth reading if you can find a copy of the book (worth having the book if you are interested in critical theory as applied to photography)

    • I am reading it now Peter as its on the PWDP list and coincided with my recent interest in Atget. Her essay is dated 1986 and I have concerns ( as I do with Berger’s writing of the 1970s) whether the past 25 years will have or should have changed how we connect with this overtly opinionated writing.

      • Totally by chance I was reading it myself last night. I dont’ find it overly opinionated at all, I find it tunes in quite well with how I tend to think about things too. I wonder if this is partly a female viewpoint? Anyway I would also be really interested to know how the last 25 years has effected how people think of this kind of feminist critique generally and how I can update my understanding of these kinds of issues.
        For me its so obvious that the way each person looks at an artist’s work is effected so much by that person’s agenda. Abigail Solomon Godeau is also doing that. As is JSU, although JSU isn’t backing up his assertion with evidence!
        I’m so interested in the idea that the “catalogue” forms his photography, it made me wonder how much our courses form our photography! Looking at myself as the only example I’m intimately acquainted with, I would say yes – its true, my work is a manifestation of my course however much I kick against it or make my work as much my own as possible. My work might not be an example of what one would imagine a preconceived response to the assignments, but nonetheless without that structure my work wouldn’t be what it is.
        Another thing it makes me wonder whether the framing of articles such as this apparently posing b&w and colour as in some way oppositional, whether that encourages these kind of oppositional discussions about it? Maybe in the days of digital another way of discussing it would be in terms of how much saturation, how much desaturation…Colour on one end of the scale, b&w on the other and a whole range in between?

  • This one has certainly drawn some debate!
    I’ll go in principle with Clive W’s last paragraph from an early post i.e. sometimes B&W suits the subject or series and sometimes colour is better.
    As I see (photographically as well as actually) in colour I generally prefer colour. Most (not all) of the work that really makes me envious is in colour too, but that may be just a coincidence with the style of photography (documentary) and the era (1970s to present) that fires my interest more than other genres and eras.
    I also enjoy the challenge of thinking through the colour and selecting/balancing the palette in the shot…in addition to the other decisions for the photographs…although sometimes a colour in the frame can be a nuisance if it’s ‘spoiling’ the balance ;-S

    • Well interesting, perhaps it depends on how much knowledge one has in all sorts of spheres but for me as they seem to have been coloured in the style of what might have been the colour process of the period, consequently they don’t look any more ‘real’ to me, just alternative.

      • I tend to agree Clive, however it is interesting to see what someone thinks the ‘right’ colours might have been! I find that the more everyday the image is the more convincing they seem. Perhaps we should have an exercise in the new level 1 that asks students to colour Fox Talbot’s Laycock images 😀

        • Well I remember doing my time hand colouring. Hahahaha. Perhaps we should get them to do it for real with photo dyes!
          It’s within my living memory that it was common practice in high street portrait outfits up and down the land.

        • I’ve been working my my personal archive and recently came across a picture I don’t ever remember seeing before of me when I was an infant – and whilst it wasn’t wet plate, it was of course black and white. I found it easier for me to comprehend by hand colouring it – it laid easier as part of my past, which is almost all described in black and white prints until I was a late teenager. So, to Clive’s point, this photograph that came to me two months ago provided me with no personal historical reference, other than being told it was me. I wonder what impelled me to create an even greater distance between it and me by synthesising that alternate view?

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