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In Praise of Black & White
Mar. 14th, 2006 01:46 pmMy good friend Julie Cohen, whose new blog has gone all chicklit on us, is celebrating the artwork for her third published novel. And at the top of the list of reasons why she loves it, she writes
1) It’s black and white. I think that makes it feel classy and, at the same time, contemporary.
Well I'll be blowed - there's hope for the world yet. Black & White photography is fashionable!
As it happens, I finally despaired of getting access to proper darkroon facilities, so I took some developed negatives that I haven't ever seen properly to a friend with a film scanner. Here's the Erasmus Brugge in Rotterdam, by night:
And here's a group of young North African men gathered outside a Schiedam cafe (I seem to recall they weren't very keen on being photographed):
Somehow these pictures work better than they would in colour. Probably because shape, and patterns of light and shade, are important to what they have to say, and colour tends to distract.
Of course, there is such a thing as a good colour photograph, and the tragedy is that when colour photographs become the norm, the delight in creating a really good colour image is diluted. Try desaturating colour pictures in the computer. I thihnk you'll be amazed at how much more striking many of them are without colour.
Tonight I'm judging at the Goring aand Streatley Photographic Society. Five'll get you ten there isn't a black & white image in sight!
1) It’s black and white. I think that makes it feel classy and, at the same time, contemporary.
Well I'll be blowed - there's hope for the world yet. Black & White photography is fashionable!
As it happens, I finally despaired of getting access to proper darkroon facilities, so I took some developed negatives that I haven't ever seen properly to a friend with a film scanner. Here's the Erasmus Brugge in Rotterdam, by night:
And here's a group of young North African men gathered outside a Schiedam cafe (I seem to recall they weren't very keen on being photographed):
Somehow these pictures work better than they would in colour. Probably because shape, and patterns of light and shade, are important to what they have to say, and colour tends to distract.
Of course, there is such a thing as a good colour photograph, and the tragedy is that when colour photographs become the norm, the delight in creating a really good colour image is diluted. Try desaturating colour pictures in the computer. I thihnk you'll be amazed at how much more striking many of them are without colour.
Tonight I'm judging at the Goring aand Streatley Photographic Society. Five'll get you ten there isn't a black & white image in sight!
