The B&W vs. Color Photography Question
Which photo would you rather look at, the B&W at top or the color, below?
This Web site is dedicated to a simple idea: good B&W photography is more interesting and compelling than most color work.
(Color Masters such as Eggleston, Meyerowitz, Shore, et al, are exempted, of course. I love great color. It’s the ubiquitous glut of mediocre color photography that bores me.)
A great photographer said it well:
The difficulty with color is to go beyond the fact that it's color – to have it be not just a colorful picture but really be a picture about something. It's difficult. So often color gets caught up in color, and it becomes merely decorative. Some photographers use [ it ] brilliantly to make visual statements combining color and content; otherwise it is empty. - Mary Ellen Mark, Mary Ellen Mark : 25 Years by Marianne Fulton , ISBN: 0821218387 , Page: 5
Thanks to Photoquotes.com
So it seemed time to address the color vs. B&W question. I picked a digital image by Michael Horowitz (see our page - Digital B&W: Big and Bold) rendered in both B&W and color, and am presenting them both to illustrate the issue.
One of these shots has an air of mystery and timelessness; the other is a literal rendering of the machine.
WHY I PREFER B&W TO COLOR
I became a photographer when B&W was still the norm, and color the exception. People yearned to shoot color, but it was more expensive all ‘round, and you couldn’t process/print it yourself without tearing your hair out.
When I got back into photography in the early 1980s color had ascended, but B&W was still mainstream. In fact, serious B&W work was resurgent. (Olden Camera in NYC had a huge darkroom floor where I got my Beseler 23C XL in 1986; then they expanded the darkroom section, adding a huge wall of shelves for their myriad B&W paper selections. Darkroom accessories overflowed from bins. It was heavenly... but I digress.)
However, before I got my darkroom going again I shot hundreds of color transparencies. It was the first time I’d ever really shot color.
I quickly saw that shooting color was, to a great degree, about finding bold & powerfully contrasting colors. That seemed superficial to me. Fun, but superficial. (Again, I’m not talking about the greats of color photography.)
I was doing pretty good work for a duffer, but B&W was calling out to me. I got the darkroom going, found Fred Picker and Zone VI and never looked back. Even then I felt out of step for being a B&W loyalist, but we like what we like.
A well-made B&W silver gelatin fiber-based print is a thing of true beauty; L.A.-based pro Frank Ockenfels recently told me he has assistants who’ve never even seen a fiber B&W print. If you haven’t seen great B&W photographic prints live & up close, do something about it!
And legendary photographers like John Sexton say they’ve never forgotten watching their first B&W prints emerge, like magic, in the developer tray. I made many color Cibachrome prints; trust me, making prints in an enclosed plastic tube lacks a certain something.
Traditional B&W simply has a timeless magic (as does good digital B&W). B&W is not an also-ran to color. It is the thing itself.
-Eric Rudolph
Tell us why you love B&W.
Email us: rudolph2528@gmail.com
Both Photos - Copyright Michael Horowitz - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
"Black and white are the colors of photography... they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected." - Robert Frank (legendary 35mm photographer, world renowned for his extraordinary book The Americans)