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Colour or black-and-white?

January 5, 2025 / No Comments

In today’s photography, colour is standard, and B&W is used for its classic, timeless look. Black-and-white photos are known for having this artistic feeling, but colour photos can have the same when done well.

I am not starting a debate about right or wrong. I want to point out the different aesthetics in these two styles.

Colour and BW photos present an image of the world in two different ways. It´s like choosing between one or the other font for writing, using adjectives in a sentence to describe the mood, or making a powerful headline.

Ten years ago, in 2015, Leica released an ad for its black-and-white digital camera, which is only capable of creating monochrome grey tones—a brilliant camera, by the way. This commercial ad said that B&W is purer than colour, suggesting that colour is for those without imagination: “In the colour world, there’s no space for dreams.” This is not true.

Colour photos can be as powerful and dreamy as a black-and-white photo. It all depends on the skills of the photographer and how we see the world in that moment.

I find black-and-white photos very powerful and use this style as a preference for much of my work. Colours can be very distracting and take away the focus from the actual form and spirit of the photo. Colours, on the other hand, can add a certain mood and expression lost in greytones. Each for each their purpose.

It was an ad, and ads often find a good phrase or headline to make an impact. This is directly comparable to a colour versus black-and-white photo. Each has its strong parts depending on what you want to “say.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson

How often I have heard: “ We don’t see in monochrome. Real life is in colour”. This way of looking at a photo or photography is old and ultimately fruitless. It has no meaning, but we must understand how we got there.

In earlier days photography was seen as too literal to be art. Maybe because photography almost mimicked paintings with long exposures and big and very static equipment. Later when cameras could be moved around it changed to be more of a reportage tool, and the images therefore were different from the start.

Pioneers like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt used B&W to create stunning compositions from the streets and for photojournalism. Often these photographers mainly worked on assignments and had the street photos as a second option they couldn’t resist, or simply mixed it.

As colour film became practical in the 1950s, many photographers resisted, believing serious photography had to be in B&W. Cartier-Bresson famously said, “Colour is bullshit.” As we all react with resistance of the new in the start, and sometimes later we change our approach.

Cartier-Bresson’s dismissal of colour stemmed from the belief that B&W worked differently, and what looked great in B&W often didn’t in colour. I sometimes have pictures captured that work equally well in both colour and black-and-white but often also find I have to choose one or the other. Where colours aren’t convincing the BW-version often is. Or it isn’t a great picture at all.

photo@mortenalbek.com www.mortenalbek.com

No matter if you choose to shoot in colour or black and white, an eye for each type of photography and composition is important. It´s rarely the same. How the colours are balanced in different parts of an image can be very different from the balance of elements and surfaces in a black-and-white photograph.

Each for their purpose.

 

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