Why photograph in black and white?

That’s a good question. I had a friend at school who couldn’t see the point in watching a black and white movie because the world was in color. I tried to explain that black and white made things look different, it changed the mood, it brought lighting and drama to the fore… and so on. He wouldn’t have it. To his mind, black and white contains less information than color and that made it, by definition, inferior.

• Articles in this black and white series
• Why photograph in black and white?
• How to shoot in black and white

I guess if you’re reading this then you won’t need much convincing about the visual appeal of black and white photography. It’s something you sense and you feel that makes it different to color. Not better, not worse, just different.

So I’ll try to explain why I think black and white has such an enduring appeal to many photographers.

A layer of abstraction

Black and white adds a layer of abstraction to imagery. Straight away you can see that it’s not literally real in the same way that color is. Its separation from the world of color makes it easier to draw attention to symbolism, graphic effect, composition, message or whatever else it is that you’re trying to capture.

Color photography is very literal, and that can often be a problem for photographers engaging with an audience that is less… how shall we say it?… less visually aware. These are the people that will say “why did you take a picture of THAT?” Your audience may not be sensitive to the graphic or emotional appeal of your image or, if they are, they are not aware of it and they simply seize on its literal content.

Black and white is already one step separated from literal reality. Even a stubbornly literal viewer must concede that you are attempting something other than a literal record and that they should perhaps look for other meanings. 

A timeless quality

Color images, and especially those produced with the clinical precision of digital cameras, are very ‘now’, very rooted in the world we occupy right at this very moment. Black and white, however, is unchanging. It looks the same now as it did ten, twenty, thirty years ago or more. If you can keep modern artefacts out of the shot, there are no clues to when it might have been taken.

You can also add some ‘false age’ with black and white editing effects such as faded contrast, dust and scratches, grain effects, borders and more. You can do the same with color images, but it can be surprisingly difficult to create convincing ‘old photo’ colors. With black and white it’s just much easier  to create ‘timeless’ images, or perhaps we should say ‘images of no definite time’.

Celebrating light

Light and color don’t always play nicely. Both tend to scream for your attention and it’s not very often that they are both strong and effective at the same time and pulling in the same direction. Color photography can be quite tricky like that. It can be difficult to celebrate the light in an image if the color is adding its own distracting element.

Light is a beautiful thing to the black and white photographer. With color out of the equation, it’s as if you can see and celebrate light properly for the first time. It can be foreboding, uplifting, brilliant and piercing. It can throw shapes, textures and lines into sharp relief, and there’s something about the contrasts and gradations of black and white tones that is both fascinating and satisfying in a way that you don’t really appreciate in color photography. I’ve said it already; black and white is not better, not worse. It’s just different. And that means it brings its own pleasures and satisfactions.

The power of composition

You’ll hear a lot of talk about composition in photography and a lot of ‘rules’, like the rule of thirds, how to use leading lines, the golden mean and all sorts of rot like that. Did I say ‘rot’? I meant advice, of course.

Whatever you think about the ‘rules’ of composition, it’s a lot easier to make images work graphically in black and white. This is important. Photographs can have very literal content which may be enough on its own to carry an image, but it’s much better if they are visually satisfying too. Everyone appreciates graphically strong images, whether they are aware of it or not. Your tastes may be different to mine – I like Bauhaus posters, Kandinsky and brutalist architecture, which probably explains a lot of my pictures. You may like altogether different graphical effects. I guess my point is that these are easier to achieve in black and white.

Why? It’s that business of color again. Color makes its own demands on the viewer’s attention, and it’s just one more variable you have to control to make a successful picture. In black and white, you can take liberties with the tonal range and contrast that don’t work so well in color. You can make objects or areas lighter or darker, without worrying about whether a color becomes too ‘hot’ and changes the composition or the emotional effect you’re trying to achieve.

Black and white is just about the interaction of light and shade, lines and shapes, tones and contrast. It’s a much more powerful and malleable graphic language. I know how pretentious that might sound, but I hope you see what I’m getting at.