Why Black and White?

Horses outside the Zhang Family Ancestral Hall, Heshun, near
Tengchong, Yunnan, China

Black & white photography continues to become more and more interesting creatively, ever since its invention in 1935. You might disagree with the date, but surely not with the sentiment – that there’s a huge creative choice between shooting in colour and in black & white; hence the importance of 1935 and the invention of Kodachrome, otherwise known as the first integral tri-pack film. While the idea of photographing in the medium that we see by – colour – was there from the very start, early processes like Autochrome were impractical curiosities. There wasn’t a sensible choice, and a century of shooting had most people on all three sides of the camera (behind, in front and viewing the results) used to doing without colour.

It didn’t mean that pre-Kodachrome photographers were colour blind, and using strongly coloured filters when shooting was an important way of translating colour into tone. But it was only once that colour became easy and possible, and very quickly took over as normal, that the idea of black & white took root. It was something to choose because you wanted to.

With film, the immediate decision was which roll to load in the camera: colour or black & white. That alone prompted some anticipation, often aesthetic but also practically, to do with light levels. Behind this, though, was the deeper personal decision of whether you saw yourself as a black & white photographer. The ethos of pure-andessential black & white versus crass-and-commonplace colour began to crystallise in the 1960s and ’70s.
 

I mention this because the sense of what black & white stands for still persists. And because colour is so thoroughly normal and, well, default, black & white is more than ever an elective choice. Not only that, but it’s a wide-ranging choice. 

Depending on how you choose to look at it, the choice lies on a scale between practical and creative, even conceptual for some people. Moreover, you can choose later, and while it’s generally a good idea to be deliberate about what you’re shooting from the start, you can still change your mind.

But are there general criteria for choosing black & white over colour, or is it just personal?

I think that there are, and the choice still remains personal. Reasons for choosing black & white generally fall into three groups: when there are issues about colour, about graphics and about genre.

First, the colour-related issues, and like most of these decisions you can see it from a problem-solving point of view or as an opportunity to do something extra. In other words, crudely put, it’s either ‘don’t like the colour so let’s eliminate it’ or ‘let’s use the colour channels to bring something more out of the shot’.

 

COLOUR

WHEN COLOUR DETRACTS OR DISTRACTS

KYEE MYINT TAING FISH MARKET, YANGON, 2014
Here, two men are arranged geometrically and caught at a moment of gesture and
expression. In colour, the basket commands attention. This alone makes it a natural to
convert to black & white, simply to take it back to what the photographer saw. Channel
adjustment during conversion gives control over how prominent or not these colours
translate into monochrome. The smaller b&w version (far right) shows one inappropriate
extreme, with an almost-white red.

One of the rewards of thinking in black & white is that it clarifies the role of colour in any scene  does it contribute, or is it taking attention away from the real focus of the shot? Life today is now more garishly colourful than ever, and many of these colours creep unwanted into the frame. Alternatively, taking a more positive attitude, black & white conversion in software may allow you to enhance an important quality in an image. 

 

So, the first question to ask, or have in the back of your mind when shooting, is: ‘Does colour help what I want from this shot?’ If not, the second question is: ‘Does the colour take attention away from what I want?’ There is then a clear case for taking the black & white option seriously.

ACTION AND EXPRESSION

KYEE MYINT TAING FISH MARKET, YANGON, 2014
Sometimes there is no clear-cut advantage either way. The colour contrast between artificial light and pre-dawn
ambient blue plays a strong role in the colour version and draws attention to the faces.
Removing colour returns the scene to the subject matter of a fish market, so that the interaction of the
two people stands out more because of expression and gesture. So, it’s hard to say which image is stronger overall.

Two components of photography that usually have very little to do with colour are action and expression. If we extend expression to include gesture and posture, and make it all about expressive moments, these are what handheld photography arguably does best.

Capturing the moment, whether decisive or any other kind, is a purely photographic quality and yet colour is typically irrelevant. Try removing the colour and see what effect this has on the viewer’s attention. Other things being equal, and provided that colour contrast isn’t doing a job of focusing attention, the action caught may seem stronger. As with all the reasons discussed here, of course, this is just a possibility or a likelihood, and it’s the specifics of the shot that count.

GRAPHICS

FOCUS ON FORMAL QUALITIES

LUDING BRIDGE, SICHUAN, 2009

Now let’s look at the graphic issues, in other words, the form of the image rather than the content. When the appeal in shooting lies in the formal visual qualities rather than the subject matter, black & white’s ‘language’ can help keep things concentrated on form, shape, line and texture. There’s a good psychological reason for this. Colour evokes psychological and emotional responses that other image qualities do not, while at the same time, our eye-and-brain’s colour sense is very coarse. So, taking  Colour out of an image is a huge encouragement to the viewer to concentrate instead on these other, more detailed formal image qualities.

TONAL SUBTLETY

At the other end of the exposure-plusprocessing spectrum, black & white also supports the  exploration of gentle tonal differences – the subtle range of greys. This has long been the appeal of platinum and palladium printing, but it extends easily into the digital realm. I sense that there’s less of this around these days, with everyone in charge of their own processing and yet tending to follow the formula of closing up the black and white points and optimising the image. The ‘range of greys’ approach to black & white is a creatively interesting one, and it’s all about fine shades of distinction.

LESS THAN IDEAL LIGHTING

However clichéd ‘golden light’ is as a shooting choice, most people like it. The warm glow is as much a part of light as the low, raking angle of sunlight, and having to do without it causes many people anxiety or dissatisfaction. Black & white suffers very little from this fixation because the ‘golden’ aspect of this light simply doesn’t exist. Imagine that while this is what you’d like for a scene, you’re simply there at midday instead. Visualise the scene in black & white, and you may find that what was harsh and cold in colour becomes strong and graphic in monochrome.

GENRE

YAK CARAVAN, MANIGANGE, SICHUAN, 2009

On to the third group of choice: genre. Now, there’s a lot that’s contradictory in black & white  photography, not least that there have been in a sense two camps in its history. One of them has been concerned with the excellence of the print and other aesthetic matters, while the other has seen black & white as a no-nonsense ‘pure’ medium unconcerned with prettiness. Both sides have co-existed through the film era, and there’s no reason why they can’t continue digitally.

A century and a half of photography has created certain visual conventions, and all the genres have developed their own special history. Among these, two in particular have a rich tradition (though by no means exclusive) of being performed in black & white, namely, photo reportage and landscape (of a certain type). Simply wanting to be a part of that tradition may not be the most subtle reason for  shooting in black & white, but it’s a very understandable one.

PHOTO REPORTAGE

Gritty reportage (even the expression conjures up grainy Kodak Tri-X) was a mainstay of editorial photography during the picture magazine era from the 1930s to the 1970s, bolstered by the reputation of photographers shooting for agencies such as Magnum. Black & white is still largely seen as the ‘natural’ medium for observational, candid, photography, especially for situations that are not about immediate news but which have some sense of the human condition.

The legacy of black & white may not be as legitimately ‘closer to the truth’ as it’s often believed to be, but it still has a hold on what many see as pure documentary, destined to last and be part of an archive.

TONAL EXTREMES

BAOSHAN, MIDDLE YANGTZE RIVER, YUNNAN, 2014

If colour photography is somehow chained to reality, with everyone expecting a kind of visual  accuracy, black & white is freer and more open to interpretation especially in exposure and  pocessing. Simply put, you can go to tonal extremes more acceptably in black & white. Blocked shadows and pure-white highlights can work perfectly well. As an experiment, take a fairly high-contrast image, and instead of trying to claw back highlight detail and open up the shadows, go the other way with processing: block up the shadows and kill the highlights for even more contrast. But do this on both a colour version and on a black & white version. It’s more than likely that the colour shot will look badly exposed/processed, while the black & white will look like a creative choice.

LANDSCAPE

PEACH BLOSSOM ISLAND, YUNNAN, 2010

Grand and yet thoughtful sums up the approach worked out in the early to mid-20th century by the school of western American photographers that included Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Considered composition and exquisite control of tonal values became hallmarks of a style that, like black & white photo reportage, persists. Part of the attraction of shooting digitally for black & white is that the conversion from an RGB original image to black & white allows you exceptional control over the tonal values of individual colours. With a little care, any colour can be turned into any shade of grey, from black to white. This follows in the tradition of using coloured filters when shooting – a technique very much pioneered by early landscape photographers.

Tips & Trick 9:39 AM