I’m so glad you write these pieces because you are able to put to eloquently put to words the half baked notions swirling around my head. I’m weary of the proclamations about black and white’s innate nobility or the purity of film.
It’s artifice posing as art. My intention is not to create the next viral image; rather it is to render the thing with the respect for which it deserves. Success rests on whether the final image retains nuances of that something I saw in the moment.
I have been out with my camera and forced my seeing, believing that by looking from a different perspective is enough to impart to a viewer the necessity of observation. Sometimes those experiments look cool however they are almost always closed images. There it is with nowhere to go.
Thank you for making the reasoned argument since my attempt would more resemble “man yells at cloud.”
This is a wonderful article, Jim. It certainly looks at issues of B&W and Monochrome images in photography, in ways I have not thought of before. So many good talking points, but one analogy really stood out for me. I've been reading, Secret Knowledge, rediscovering the lost techniques of Old Masters, by David Hockney (who sadly passed away a couple of days ago).
Hockney has Caravaggio down as the first "director of talent" in front of a camera! Yes, a lens was used to outline the compositions, and the dark rooms, contrast and brightness, it could be argued (and Hockeny does) are artifacts of what was required by the (secret) technology of the day to make the projections, to outline the image. Was Caravaggio a great painter? Absolutely!!! But his drafting skills it seems (and many others - that's Hockney's argument) were augmented by optical tools, according to Hockney.
I bring this up because although there is a lot of good factual information in your article. Some of it just seems like nitpicking. To change the way B&W film "saw" the world... one used colour filters on the the front of the camera so the light was filtered differently (the wavelength changed), to change the contrast. There was no other choice - if you were shooting B&W. In many ways, "art sauce" or not, I find many of these distinctions, desaturated, or physically rendered on a digital sensor (is that possible) or actual film, almost a form of infighting. Time will decide what's art and what is mere artifice, should the work be lucky enough to survive that long.
These ideas are important and well worth thinking about. Then, it might be worth considering that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is still a duck! I used to consider my self to be a B&W film shooting and B&W printing specialist in the 1980s. Today I am more than happy to take advantage of the wonderful flexibility of digital photography, by delving into the menu system of my Nikons, and setting the camera to B&W when I want a B&W image, and still have a colour file to re-render a B&W from later if I want to.
Sally Mann certainly sums it up well, it's all process (art process) and whatever you do it's important to know when to stop.
I look forward to reading more comments from other photographers on this important subject. Great article.
Actually no one mentioned, to any real degree, Hockney’s photos, which were really quite wonderful. I was goiing too write about them but just ran out of time.
Jim, most of my comment was not about Hockney, it was a response to this quote from your essay
"What Caravaggio had was not just technical skill, though the technical skill was extraordinary. What he had was a way of seeing, a decision about where the light should fall and what that light should mean, a theology of darkness and illumination worked out over years of looking and thinking and failing. The chiaroscuro is not a technique applied to the painting. It is the argument the painting is making. You cannot spray that on."
The "chiaroscuro " is an Artifact of the lens (from reading Hockney) - so even a Caravaggio is not quite what it seems... My point in brief is that technology is not passive, well we know that. Its the work itself that ultimately maters.
Jim thanks for this fascinating read. Not only I feel enlightened in the matter of black and white photography, I was inspired to look at my photography with a critical eye. It made me realise I was on the wrong track. So thank you. I am learning a lot from you which is helping my photography.
To my knowledge Salgado had to switch to digital photography in 2008 due to his films damaged in airport x-ray machines. But he refrained from using digital output directly. He used them to develop a different and a more elaborate process mimicking film negatives.
He disclosed this new (at the time) process briefly in an interview with Black & White magazine.
For convenience I am attaching the below excerpt from that interview describing his process in his own words. I think you may find it interesting.
Are you still shooting film for your projects?
> No. I shot about half this project on film, then switched to digital. But I shoot the same way. When I get back to Paris I have contact sheets made. I bring a lot of cards with me. I do my editing with a loupe, not on a screen. I have work prints made for me which are about postcard size. When my selection is done we make a 4×5 negative to make my larger prints. My negatives now are far better than the ones I had shooting medium-format film. We introduce Tri-X-type grain digitally, adjusting the look of the grain to go with each image.
Thanks so much for your very thoughtful and articulate discussion of B&W in the digital era.
I am a retired engineer & R&D executive. Landscape photography is my retirement avocation. Much of my progress in photography has come through self-teaching in general and very careful study of the work of accomplished photographers.
I’ve been photographing, on and off, since the mid-1980s. In the analog era, my work was exclusively on transparency film, Kodachrome and Ektachrome. In the digital era, I became interested in B&W. At first, I was surprised by the relative paucity of thoughtful material directed to the question of “what makes a good B&W image?” At first, I also thought the Photoshop Black & White layer or its equivalent in Lightroom, was a gift that Ansel would have given treasure to have had. In time, I’ve come to realize just how wrong that impression was.
In time, I did find some helpful authors. One very good source was the writing of Joel Tjintjelaar . Two key quotes from Chapter 12 of his co-authored book-length pdf (1):
• “ . . . photography is all about light and that is exactly what black and white essence is. Black and white is all about light in its pure form or the absence of it, while color is about . . . colors.”
• “When you do not understand that black and white photography is not about desaturation of colors or even about conversion of colors but more about determining the light or its absence and then enhancing or emphasizing it, then we are talking about the majority of black and white photographers.”
With help, I have come to the point where I very much agree with your thesis. Decide that that image will be black and white before you trip the shutter, wait for the light and aim to capture its subtleties in camera.
Frank Field
Victoria, British Columbia
(1) Joel Tjintjelaar & Julia Anna Gospodarou, “From Basics to Fine Art: Black & White Photography - Architecture and Beyond,” First electronic edition, 2014. PDF available from the authors for a reasonable fee.
I’m so glad you write these pieces because you are able to put to eloquently put to words the half baked notions swirling around my head. I’m weary of the proclamations about black and white’s innate nobility or the purity of film.
It’s artifice posing as art. My intention is not to create the next viral image; rather it is to render the thing with the respect for which it deserves. Success rests on whether the final image retains nuances of that something I saw in the moment.
I have been out with my camera and forced my seeing, believing that by looking from a different perspective is enough to impart to a viewer the necessity of observation. Sometimes those experiments look cool however they are almost always closed images. There it is with nowhere to go.
Thank you for making the reasoned argument since my attempt would more resemble “man yells at cloud.”
This is a wonderful article, Jim. It certainly looks at issues of B&W and Monochrome images in photography, in ways I have not thought of before. So many good talking points, but one analogy really stood out for me. I've been reading, Secret Knowledge, rediscovering the lost techniques of Old Masters, by David Hockney (who sadly passed away a couple of days ago).
Hockney has Caravaggio down as the first "director of talent" in front of a camera! Yes, a lens was used to outline the compositions, and the dark rooms, contrast and brightness, it could be argued (and Hockeny does) are artifacts of what was required by the (secret) technology of the day to make the projections, to outline the image. Was Caravaggio a great painter? Absolutely!!! But his drafting skills it seems (and many others - that's Hockney's argument) were augmented by optical tools, according to Hockney.
I bring this up because although there is a lot of good factual information in your article. Some of it just seems like nitpicking. To change the way B&W film "saw" the world... one used colour filters on the the front of the camera so the light was filtered differently (the wavelength changed), to change the contrast. There was no other choice - if you were shooting B&W. In many ways, "art sauce" or not, I find many of these distinctions, desaturated, or physically rendered on a digital sensor (is that possible) or actual film, almost a form of infighting. Time will decide what's art and what is mere artifice, should the work be lucky enough to survive that long.
These ideas are important and well worth thinking about. Then, it might be worth considering that if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is still a duck! I used to consider my self to be a B&W film shooting and B&W printing specialist in the 1980s. Today I am more than happy to take advantage of the wonderful flexibility of digital photography, by delving into the menu system of my Nikons, and setting the camera to B&W when I want a B&W image, and still have a colour file to re-render a B&W from later if I want to.
Sally Mann certainly sums it up well, it's all process (art process) and whatever you do it's important to know when to stop.
I look forward to reading more comments from other photographers on this important subject. Great article.
I’m still wondering why no one has written an more comprehensive piece of Hockney’s photo work? Seems strange.
Actually no one mentioned, to any real degree, Hockney’s photos, which were really quite wonderful. I was goiing too write about them but just ran out of time.
Jim, most of my comment was not about Hockney, it was a response to this quote from your essay
"What Caravaggio had was not just technical skill, though the technical skill was extraordinary. What he had was a way of seeing, a decision about where the light should fall and what that light should mean, a theology of darkness and illumination worked out over years of looking and thinking and failing. The chiaroscuro is not a technique applied to the painting. It is the argument the painting is making. You cannot spray that on."
The "chiaroscuro " is an Artifact of the lens (from reading Hockney) - so even a Caravaggio is not quite what it seems... My point in brief is that technology is not passive, well we know that. Its the work itself that ultimately maters.
Jim thanks for this fascinating read. Not only I feel enlightened in the matter of black and white photography, I was inspired to look at my photography with a critical eye. It made me realise I was on the wrong track. So thank you. I am learning a lot from you which is helping my photography.
To my knowledge Salgado had to switch to digital photography in 2008 due to his films damaged in airport x-ray machines. But he refrained from using digital output directly. He used them to develop a different and a more elaborate process mimicking film negatives.
He disclosed this new (at the time) process briefly in an interview with Black & White magazine.
Here is the link: https://www.bandwmag.com/articles/sebastiao-salgado-the-genesis-project
For convenience I am attaching the below excerpt from that interview describing his process in his own words. I think you may find it interesting.
Are you still shooting film for your projects?
> No. I shot about half this project on film, then switched to digital. But I shoot the same way. When I get back to Paris I have contact sheets made. I bring a lot of cards with me. I do my editing with a loupe, not on a screen. I have work prints made for me which are about postcard size. When my selection is done we make a 4×5 negative to make my larger prints. My negatives now are far better than the ones I had shooting medium-format film. We introduce Tri-X-type grain digitally, adjusting the look of the grain to go with each image.
Thanks for the email.
Jim –
Thanks so much for your very thoughtful and articulate discussion of B&W in the digital era.
I am a retired engineer & R&D executive. Landscape photography is my retirement avocation. Much of my progress in photography has come through self-teaching in general and very careful study of the work of accomplished photographers.
I’ve been photographing, on and off, since the mid-1980s. In the analog era, my work was exclusively on transparency film, Kodachrome and Ektachrome. In the digital era, I became interested in B&W. At first, I was surprised by the relative paucity of thoughtful material directed to the question of “what makes a good B&W image?” At first, I also thought the Photoshop Black & White layer or its equivalent in Lightroom, was a gift that Ansel would have given treasure to have had. In time, I’ve come to realize just how wrong that impression was.
In time, I did find some helpful authors. One very good source was the writing of Joel Tjintjelaar . Two key quotes from Chapter 12 of his co-authored book-length pdf (1):
• “ . . . photography is all about light and that is exactly what black and white essence is. Black and white is all about light in its pure form or the absence of it, while color is about . . . colors.”
• “When you do not understand that black and white photography is not about desaturation of colors or even about conversion of colors but more about determining the light or its absence and then enhancing or emphasizing it, then we are talking about the majority of black and white photographers.”
With help, I have come to the point where I very much agree with your thesis. Decide that that image will be black and white before you trip the shutter, wait for the light and aim to capture its subtleties in camera.
Frank Field
Victoria, British Columbia
(1) Joel Tjintjelaar & Julia Anna Gospodarou, “From Basics to Fine Art: Black & White Photography - Architecture and Beyond,” First electronic edition, 2014. PDF available from the authors for a reasonable fee.