WHY BLACK AND WHITE?

JANUARY 3, 2025

Happy New Year! This week I would like to return to England and Scotland one last time in order to discuss the ways that black and white photography can invigorate your image creation and allow you to make your images feel more like your own. Of course your mileage might vary, and there is certainly nothing wrong if you like a particular color version better than its black and white counterpart.

Fran and I had a great six weeks in England and Scotland. I took many photographs, and then  created a nice number of meaningful images. I’ve shown you guys many of these images over the past few months. I enjoy them as color images - it’s difficult to argue with the incredible blues and greens and browns of these landscapes. I’m proud to show them, and am somewhat surprised at how much more I feel that their black and white versions speak clearly of my intentions when I first saw these landscapes.

Black and white conveys mood better than color photography. Either view of this iconic mountain at the mouth of Glen Coe conveys grandeur, but I   feel that the black and white version adds to the feeling of doom that pervades this landscape.

If any of these images are truly important, the fact is that any great black and white photograph is based on its origins as a great color photograph. This was true even in the age of film, since no photographer ever met any scene in the real world that was not in color. In our digital age current technology preserves this original color, but then allows us to use all of this information to create black and white images in ways that are easier and were sometimes impossible in the darkroom. I came into photography at the tail end of the film era, and never really had the opportunity to fall in love with the darkroom. I also resisted the emerging digital age (that’s just the way I am) but when the new technology advanced to the point where the cameras could withstand my vigorous usage without breaking instantly, I finally made the leap.

If its all about the light, go to black and white. This scene has mountains, clouds and the sea, but the "gesture" that caught my attention are the "God Rays" that lasted  for only a few moments and made this view absolutely magical. Black and white allows for exposure manipulation that brings out the light that was there in the scene which would appear unrealistic in color.

The abstraction of black and white allows me to emphasize the range of tonality in the scene. Viewers will delight in this range of tones, even though they "know" that the sky is never really black.

Since then I have learned to improve my images in the digital realm a million miles farther than my amateur efforts in the darkroom. The left side of my brain is just as amazed at the magic of the prints emerging from my printer as I was at the miracle of a print suddenly appearing in a chemical bath. The right side of my brain knows that my post-processing zeroes and ones can do everything that chemicals could do in the darkroom. I leave it to those who can afford the best cameras from the film era, not to mention the film, to enjoy their efforts in a darkroom, as long as they don’t insist that there is some magic in a chemical film response that cannot be duplicated on the computer.

The colors in this view of an unworldly landscape are only a distraction. The removal of those colors conveys mood and heightens the textures of these hillocks while further separating them from the real hills beyond.

In this view of an even more alien landscape, the black and white version allows for heightened contrast that further defines the awesome grandeur of the scene. The color version seems to make it far more ordinary, even though a viewer knows that it is not.

One of my favorite photographers, Jay Maisel, wrote an entire book of his work based on the idea that a great photographic image relies on Light, Gesture, and Color. A black and white image is based on exactly the same criteria, even though there is no longer any color - but there still is. All of those shades of grey are based on the real colors that existed in the real world, and it is the job of the photographer to coax the life out of similar shades of grey that emerge when you simply desaturate an image. Change Color into Contrast, and that becomes the poetry of a black and white image. This is not surprising, since most powerful color images are based on color contrast. What we lose in color contrast, we gain in manipulating those 256 shades of grey to achieve contrasting tones that are based on the original colors in the real world.

Glen Coe is extraordinary in any light, but once again black and white emphasizes textures and tonal gradations much more that the color version. The skies and the lonely road emerge from the color version, and the overall mood is that we better get down that road, for it might not end well if we stay in this valley much longer.

The colors are charming in this magical landscape, but black and white really conveys the textures of the land, so that I think that the viewer really knows what it feels like to round that corner.

Vincent Versace, another great photographer, added one more criteria to Maisel’s list. Black and White photography exhibits a “Timelessness” that went beyond mere nostalgia to a continuum with the photography’s entire history. In many of my images of England and Scotland, there is absolutely no hint of the real age of the photographic image - it could have been captured yesterday, or one hundred years ago. That timelessness of black and white imagery lends itself to subjects that transcend human scales of time like these landscapes.

Yes, there is no argument with a mountain confronting a loch. Either version is breathtaking.  But notice how the black and white version somehow just appears much more rugged, since it allows me to subtly heighten the contrast of the surfaces of the mountain cliffs. The black sea feels as real as its dark blue in the real world.

The majesty of Glen Coe is awfully hard to ignore or mess up as a photographer. While I miss the beautiful brown grasses in the foreground, the rest of the colors in the scene only seem to distract me. The increased textures and tonal gradations that I can emphasize tin the black and white version seem much more satisfying than the missing colors.

As black and white imagery eliminates color, it heightens our awareness of other important concerns that make up a fine photograph - chief among them lines, shapes, tonality, textures, and mood. “Gesture”, which might be defined as what made you press the shutter in the first place, is still just as important - but color is no longer a distraction. The fundamental abstraction of black and white is more readily acceptable to most viewers than almost any other abstract element in a photograph. That acceptance gives a photographer much more leeway in post-processing, allowing changes in an image that would be dismissed as “unrealistic” in color.

This scene really illustrates the importance of the mood that a photographer wants to convey in his interpretation of a landscape. the color version is just entirely too pleasant, a delightful loch-side scene, a postcard of Scotland. The black and white version reveals my truth - the end of the world feeling at the end of a lonely twelve miles of single-track road that threaded its way through those mountains just past the loch and the trees.

I hope you have seen in these  examples that black and white’s freedom of expression can lead to a much more personal interpretation of  incredible vistas that has long attracted photographers, and will continue to captivate them long after you are gone.