Black and White Photos as 'Art'? (updated 9/3/16)

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Darrian-Ashoka's avatar
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    I believe there is an odd misnomer about B&W images these days (black & white photography). A little history about B&W: Originally it was the only type of film available for well over a century. There was even a strongly held myth we all dream in B&W. Yet, if you think about it this could not possibly be true; given the fact of how before there was any B&W images the human mind would not have any reference to B&W from what we saw in our surroundings. After there was many B&W images shown that is when our mind would have taken this and played with it in our dream world. When they finally developed color film B&W film was still sold as a cheaper option, since processing of B&W film and making prints was so much less expensive than processing color film and prints. Very few Professional Photographers could afford to have a color lab and had to send out their film for processing and then making prints.


    For young photography students to practice with it B&W film and prints made sense, so for that reason B&W film was still widely sold and used as a less expensive option to color film, but should never have been thought of as an advantage to color. Although, to save money lots of galleries pushed B&W prints as some sort of special artistic alternative to color images. Because of decades of this fraudulent practice to swindle collectors to think B&W was better it had had spilled over into the digital photography world when the cost of color lazer printers was still so expensive. With this trend lasting so many decades even tough there is now no financial advantage to print B&W these days it is still erroneously thought of as artistic, as if it were a sign of class. Some how stripping away all the color makes an image art? Really? I see it is more like with 'The Emperor's New Clothes' story; no, he's just naked. B&W photos are just less than. Robbed of all the natural color they had, or any intentional artistic thought or creativity. If a painter chose to work with just black paint on a white canvas, and had the audacity to call it more artistic that way would you fall for it? Or realize they were they just being cheap and lazy? I trust you can now see the crystal clear logic here I am presenting.


    I do not mean to tell others what to do here of course. Aesthetics is not really a subject that can be argued. Just sharing my opinion and educating people to see it for what it is. I am referring to the use of B&W in the final presentation of an image. Just clicking a button to strip away all the color from an image does not automatically make it a work of art. That's like suggesting only a pencil or charcoal drawing can be considered art, but not a color painting? Seriously..... I rather say a rose is a fragrant flower, where a turd is just stinky feces to be avoided, unless you are using it to fertilizing that flower bed. The flower is still the primary result we are after.


    Over the last 2 decades I have edited well over a million digital images and I have found the only reason to convert a photo into B&W is when the exposure and color was so bad off it cannot be fixed in post editing to look decent, but it is still just a cop-out to salvage a crappy image. Personally I do not ever convert images to just B&W. I turn them some variation of Sepia tone. I find B&W too stark and boring or odd looking. It would actually take more effort to randomly splatter paint on a canvas and call that art than it does to just the click of a mouse to erase all the color from an image, so there is no real thought or effort put into this 'technique'. A 4 year old child could do it just as easily. No matter what sort of fancy spin you put on it I think B&W images still looks like crap in 99% of the images I've been able to see shown in both manner, and I retain the hope you will agree with this logic. Please give that ruined image some sort of colored sepia-tone for goodness sake. At least make some sort of effort to intentionally alter the image in an artistic manner. It's about the 'intention' of the artist that makes any image art, and some time it is by accident, but it takes little if any 'intention' to strip away color. Like I said; just a single click of the mouse in most any image editing program will do it. Some times they will alter the contrast a bit. Although, many shooters don't even put that much effort in this process. They just set their camera to record all the images in B&W inside the camera, but then there's no way to recover that lost color to even see what it could have looked like. Which removes their artistic intent all together.


    Please do not take this as a personal slam on someone's skill or the subject matter. I am just saying I would personally be embarrassed to show off a B&W image as if I were just covering up the fact that I did not have decent lighting on my subject, and was not able to fix it in post production enough to make it reasonably presentable. Many fans may not realize my grave mistake, but there would be some with an educated eye for this who would see what I was trying to cover up by stripping out the rancid color I could not fix.


    I have the same issue with grainy and flurry images as well. Some pawn it off as an artistic feature, but all I can see is an unclear image. Back when we shot with film if we had no option to increase the light on our subject we would need to get much faster exposure film, but we also knew this would horribly sacrifice the image quality, as it prints out terribly grainy. It blows my mind any one would do that to an image on purpose! Holly Shit, what were you thinking? Shallow focal depth is also a cheap, lazy cop-out I see all to often from so called 'Professional Photographers' who do not bother to properly light their subject.  I know some like the shallow focal depth, but you might want to consider how people do not see the world that way. We do not perceive a shallow focal depth of what we see around us, since our eyes tend to adjust to what ever we are looking at, which happens faster than we would notice the change.


Bottom line: 'B&W' does not make an image a work of 'art'. In fact I think it just ruins that image.

I have seen thousands of amazing images that were displayed in B&W, but I still wish I could see them in color.


What's your take on this?

© 2015 - 2024 Darrian-Ashoka
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watsondoc's avatar
You interesting points. I do not work in B&W myself, but I understand that some photographers may make careful use of light and shading to produce a pleasing image in black, white and grey tones. 
Can that be artistic? I think it can, but it's not necessarily so. I'm sure there are also images produced in the manner you describe. The real question in my mind is whether the end product is pleasing to the eye and the mind. We may never know what was in the photographer's mind in creating the image.