You might think that digital technology had resolved the old tussle between black and white and colour photography.  You can take everything in colour, desaturate it, and then decide which version you like best.  Yet choice may well be fool’s gold.

When colour started to get a foothold after WW2, Walker Evans famously reflected the traditional view of the photo-artist when he said: “Color photography is vulgar.” But change was coming and Mary Warner Marien* describes its cusp in the 1950s and early 60s like this:

“In spite of the efforts of Kodak and Polaroid to convince artists to work with the new technique, the biases against colour photography expressed by [Edward] Weston and [Walker] Evans permeated the world of serious art photography.  Notwithstanding the occasional museum exhibition of color work, art photography persisted mostly as a black and white medium.  This attitude put it at odds with commercial photography and photojournalism, both of which adapted more quickly to the possibilities of color to promote products or interest readers.  The art photographers’ preference for black and white contrasted sharply with the adoption of color film by amateurs who happily moved from black and white snapshots to color pictures.  The reality effect – the sense of authenticity and honesty passed from black and white film to color.”

The idea, plain and simple, that colour photography is vulgar and that black and white is artistic looks very dated these days.  After all there is some great colour photography around - though maybe the best homes in on colour itself:  Saul Leiter, say, or Harry Gruyaert or Ernst Haas.   The stew gets a bit thick, for my taste anyway, when we have to get both the colour and the content on board. ( I saw an exhibition of a very well known colour photographer a year or two ago at the National Portrait Gallery and just could not get a foothold.  Can’t say who obviously – well, okay, William Eggleston.  My eyes just kept sliding off the photos.)

De gustibus non est disputandum, then? (When I was a lawyer I eventually realised why no one translates the latin maxims that the law is so fond of. It’s because there is no agreement about what they mean in English, and therefore how to apply them. They are the dark matter of the courtroom, little black holes which suck in the unwary.) Is it simply a matter of personal taste? Ernst Gombrich”** has another suggestion.  It goes something like this.

Everyone knows, when they look at a black and white photograph that there is no black and white world out there.  It is a transformation of the world we see into monochrome tones.  In that sense it is a full code which we learn to interpret by separating the code from the content.  Colour photography on the other hand tends to persuade us that it is an accurate image of what exists out there.  Yet some of its colours may be quite accurate when others are not.  A comparison of the same shot from any two different models of camera or any two types of film soon shows that because they vary so much.  So that makes it a partial code.  This creates confusion because we do not know what is real and what is not: we cannot separate the code from the content. So it is more a matter of communication than of art. An analogy which often occurs to me is that black and white is to colour as radio is to television. Your imagination has to work harder with black and white/radio. It requires more effort but in the end is more satisfying.

Fool’s gold? With a computer you can adjust your image infinitely after the event. You need very little time or skill. Once you saw a scene and recorded it in a photograph. Now you take a photograph and can decide later what to record: monochrome or colour It’s not the same thing at all. Process is reversed. The discipline is gone.

O tempus, O mores.

* Photography: A Cultural History. Laurence King Publishing 2002. See the section on colour photography in Chapter Six.

** Ernst Gombrich: The Visual Image: Its Place In Communication. From The Essential Gombrich, Phaidon 1996. I’ve paraphrased - perhaps to the point of distortion.