The Joys of Black & White Photography

Firehole, Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area, Wyoming

Photography to the amateur is recreation, to the professional it is work, and hard work too, no matter how pleasurable it may be. —Edward Weston

I’ve been working hard these past few days, making photos and video. I've retraced some of my route from my last road trip, eighteen months ago, visiting the Badlands, Bear Butte, and Devil’s Tower, although I stopped in different places, with different light than last time—which was winter, this time it’s summer, and hotter than blazes all day long, usually in the 90s, well over 100 degrees according to one readout, and I’m a bit sunburned—and took different kinds of photos. I am reviewing them now, and liking several so far. I am also experimenting with converting the best of them to black and white from the color originals.

I was reading Edward Weston: Color Photography before leaving on this trip, and it both inspired me and stimulated my thinking.

The prejudice many photographers have against color photography comes from not thinking of color as form. You can say things with color that can’t be said in black and white. . . . Those who say that color will eventually replace black and white are talking nonsense. The two do not compete with each other. They are different means to different ends. —Edward Weston


Firehole, Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area, Wyoming

Black and white is more artificial than color, in the original sense of the word artifice: rather, B&W allows for more of the photographer’s control and decision. A color photo can be apparently pure reportage; or rather, it is unquestioned in a way that B&W is not. One is reduced to pure tone and form. Some subjects are better suited to color, because there is critical information in the color values. But one reason B&W is still considered—rightly or wrongly—the more artistic medium is because it is more akin to artifice than is the quick color snapshot. The aesthetic prejudice for B&W over color is debatable at this point in time; Weston is correct that neither supplants the other, but at the same time each is valid as an artform. It's no longer accurate to say that B&W is "more artistic" than color. Yet I am drawn to it, as a change from color. I've often worked in monochrome; indeed I have a whole body of work that's monochrome, which I return to from time to time.

You find a few subjects that can be expressed in either color or black-and-white. But you find more that can be said only through one of them. Many I photographed would be meaningless in black-and-white; the separation of forms is possible only because of the juxtaposition of colors. —Edward Weston

In the desert Southwest, scene after scene can be monochrome, pure shape and form. But then there are also many wherein color is the whole point. The colors of mountain strata turned on their side make a display as brilliant as it is unforgettable. Painters have achieved this; although one remembers that east coast art critics didn't believe at first that the colors in the canvases Georgia O'Keeffe painted in New Mexico were real. They were accurate in every detail.


Dinosaur National Monument, Utah/Colorado

The artist can adjust tonal gradations in editing and printing black and white. Weston’s exquisite and influential prints were all 8x10 contact prints from the negative. Ansel Adams developed the zone system for B&W printing, and was equally influential in establishing photography as a valid artform. Both of them were masters in the darkroom, which is where the print really came to life, reflecting the artist’s input and intuition. Printing is more like painting than making a negative, perhaps.

When I work with a B&W digital image, the process feels like the darkroom process. Everything I ever learned about tone and shading, dodging and burning, all the technical aspects of producing a good print: these all apply. You look to bring out the tonal areas that need enhancement, and leave those alone that do not. It can be very engrossing. The end result is a B&W image that is as carefully mastered as in the darkroom. What matters is the end result: the finished image.

But anyone who thinks that any photograph, color or B&W, is somehow pure and untouched, has fallen for the myth of photojournalism's honesty. In fact, all photos being with a decision: when to open the camera's shutter. After that, the artist makes many other decisions. A photo is not pure: it is always as worked through as an art object.