Why Black and White?
When I decided to embrace my new found freedom (short term and mostly illusionary it may be), my mind went instantly to black and white.
Why?
Not sure, but rather than fight the feeling, I have been trying to explore it without any pressure from my current, sparse, work practices, or any long practiced pre-conceptions. My usual process with black and white is to declare my desire, start the process and then come crawling back to colour like a sugar addict to candy.
I (we all) see in colour naturally, but some of us can also “see” in black and white. I am not sure I am one of these gifted few, but I have desire. Lots of desire. Ironically the enemy of film (digital) offers us the brilliant tool of seeing in mono jpeg through the view finder, while shooting on colour with RAW.
Now all I have to do is turn this desire into some discipline and turn out some work.
Here are a few things I have (re)discovered while pondering this newish direction (many trains of thought will overlap, but these are not the thoughts of a fully coherent mind, just the ramblings of someone trying to get a handle on their art).
Black and white offers no safety net. Stripping away the very thing that often attracts us, colour, requires the artist to respond with tones textures and contrast only. Black and white offers no “quick fix”. No eye catching, or mood forming foundation. It works on one level or it does not.
It is obvious what element makes this image. Would it be as relevant in black and white? Maybe, but it immediately looses the one thing that caught my eye in the first place, so it will have to work in another way. This whole series was shot with colour in mind. I wonder if any of the images taken would have been taken for a similar series of mono images.
It is more artistically compelling. Mono image making is artistic by nature and realistically it is not much good for record keeping (your mind has to fill in too many blanks). It compels you to be an artist, because it is not particularly useful for anything else. It has always been a post-process based medium, which has much in common I guess with digital work flow. No black and white image maker now or in the past should feel constrained to try to create a purely literal representation of the world. It is not possible nor desirable. Ansel Adams is a fine example of an artist who developed deep and lengthy controls over his black and white image making, but was forced occasionally to shoot colour basically “straight” which he struggled with. In recent years I have been unfortunate enough to see what modern photoshop meddling can do to those colour images, but for 60 years of their lives, the images were left essentially untouched. His black and white work on the other hand seems reasonably impervious to tampering.
The colour image was similar as the visual elements are basic, but even the smallest amount of colour forced a mood response. In colour, the image was colder, in mono it has been toned warmer.
It is less driven by fashion. Mono is mono with small sub-sets of harsher, grainier and colour toned. Colour is much more a slave to what ever is “in” right now or is even limited by choices such of film stock or digital camera sensors/settings and will always show this out over time. Most colour images can be time stamped to their era as a visual record of slowly evolving technology or tastes. Black and white images are much harder to categorise. I have seen many subtle and not so subtle shifts in colour perception over the years, but black and white has the ability to withstand time, simply due to a lack of pesky colour. It must also be remembered that even though colour image making is often limited by the perception of it needing to be accurate to life, it rarely is anyway. For many years the world thought of exotic places, far away in a National Geographic, Kodachrome palette, then Fuji took ascendency, changing that, then digital. Ever changing, colour is a poor time-neutral observer, but it is excellent for recalling a feeling of time and place because of this.
It is easier. No colour balancing and fewer limitations forced on you by poor light or limited time. Tones, textures and contrast are all easily attained with even the most mundane subject in almost any light. Mono has many moods and can adjust as needed, but it can also shine just as well as colour when the stars align. It even simplifies the basic requirements of printing. This is of course a bit of a tempting trap. Seemingly simple, it requires a lot more than it would seem to work.
This girl’s red hair caught my eye, but the colour files never looked settled. Mono allows me better placement of the high and low tones and emphasises the shapes and textures, rather than being dominated by the colour of her hair (incidentally the wall behind her was red also, creating a harsh balance).
It is harder. It forces me to push for more honest visual strength without falling back on any habits of lazy gimmickry, which colour can do. If you see an eye catching red leaf on a green mossy rock? Don’t get too excited, because all you will have to use are tones, textures and contrast, which may not translate well as the colours do, not to mention the inevitable deflation taking the colour away can inflict. Mono makes me (us) work harder and look for excuse free visual impact through strength, or subtlety. Nothing comes for free. Basically, mono has little tolerance for weak crap, held together by simple colour tricks. It challenges us to see differently from the conventions and triggers evolution has made us respond to.
Editing is fun and freeing. Editing in colour forces rigid decisions on the photographer. Push too hard and the image shows it, push too little and the natively unprocessed image looks flat and uninviting. This is exactly the same dynamic as colour film. You are forced to use what you are offered, limiting your controls to basic film/digital file choices (which ironically forced a specific palette on you), then you pushed and pulled within those constraints. Exceed this and your image falls under the umbrella of over Photoshop art. Black and white invites you to experiment. It almost demands it.
Mixed and difficult light, compounded by poor exposure, dominated this colour image. Much of it was nullified by switching to mono. This also highlights the flattening effect mono has, making the Bokeh vitally important as out of focus areas move to the same visual plane as the foreground elements of the image (in the colour image, the girl on the far left was a cool pink-blue, contrasting with the warmer natural light in the foreground, making her feel further away).
Editing needs constant review and realignment (and courage). Editing black and white images well is a difficult art. Basically, the biggest problem for me is remembering what is important and staying true to the path. Just going out and shooting some colour images and converting them in Lightroom is not going to do the job. You need to shoot for black and white from the get-go. Editing a good black and white image is often a fine line between too much and too little. True some of my favourite mono images have been salvage jobs from poorly realised colour files, but you put enough monkeys up trees with type writers….
The colour file was washed out, milky and flat. The images problems translated into character in mono, complimenting the subject.
Black and white changes the shape of the world. Mono images change our perceptions of depth, mood and relevance. The single red leaf in a sea of green, the yellow taxi in the distance that creates a feeling here-to-there. These are all gone. the world often seems to flatten out, often brighten and visually equalise in black and white.
Technical concerns become less limiting, maybe even more creative. Technical constraints in colour often come down to noise degradation at higher ISO settings, sharpness and colour quality. With some (though ever fewer) cameras, these can be severely limiting. Colour noise is not nice, just as colour film grain was less than ideal, but mono grain in either medium adds texture, which is just as valid as any other contrast controlling tool. Sharpness also has few useful tools to apply in colour and these are easy to over use. In black and white, natural contrast abounds as part of the process, offering strong clarity tools without making an image look too harsh or manipulated. This gives you more options and flexibility as the limits of naturalness forced on you with colour, are far less defined. The Lion image above was a good example of a bad colour digital file. The texture added by refining the noise into film like grain does nothing to diminish the image’s power and even helps to fix other issues it had.
It is abstract. This is a little difficult to sell as I find colour is also good for abstraction, but mono generally suits abstraction well simply because the things that make it work are a combination of abstractions wedded together the make a coherent whole. Abstraction is just the removal of more or less of the key indictors or form and shape.
These tiles were basically mono anyway, but switching to true mono enhanced their clean strength, removing any hint of colour induced, mood bias.
It is accepted. Black and white has spent many years on the fringes of the art world, working often fruitlessly for acceptance, never fully competing on an equal footing until relatively recently. We forget though that for most of it’s life black and white was the grown up or “real” photographic art form and colour was lucky to ride on it’s coat tails, desperately trying to cash in on the left overs. Black and white images as old as 150 years are highly sought after, but colour has had a much patchier journey. Sadly, when colour was finally finding it’s feet, digital saturation has diluted it’s power. Strangely, mono has retained it’s integrity.
It is different. The more pictures that are taken, the more marginal variation becomes. The simplest way to be different is to do something off the main stream and do it better than the average. Mono has been a little lost over the last decade or so, so it is ripe for a few dedicated souls to get back on the train and ride it for all it is worth. The best advice I can give is pick up a few books of film shooters work, like Michael Kenna, Salgado, Nick Brandt etc and give yourself a visual refresher of what mono is capable of. Even Adam’s relatively ancient The Camera, The Negative and The Print trio of books are still relevant.
It makes me work differently. This one is a given. I use different lenses, see things differently and work towards different goals when shooting in mono. This goes back to my film days, but with jpeg mono previews it is even easier (which is good because I am out of practice). I have no doubt that my photographic brain changes shape when I consciously shoot for mono.
Nothing to see here in colour, but the flat, unexciting tree line was specifically chosen to show the power of black and white for some subjects.
It is a challenge to stick to it. I find mono image making sometimes……too grown up. It is a bit like watching something educational on the TV. You know you will be better for it, but the lure of pure, no strings attached escapism is strong. I feel black and white image making makes me a better photographer and I have a good track record with it, but it always seems to be the more serious road to take. I think I respond too strongly to colour in an instinctive emotional way and often fear black and white will strip too much of that mystery and discovery away. Like any addiction, the more I apply myself to the “one true path”, the less I miss “the dark side”. My usual process is to shoot colour and “see” mono images occasionally in them, but maybe I need to do the opposite (or both?).
It will make me a better colour image maker. I certainly will not abandon colour, but the more I train my eye with mono, the stronger my foundations for future colour images will become.