Black & white or colour?

ladies and gentlemen we live in troubled times indeed we seem to be governed by a tawdry collection of tyrants charlatans idiots and tyrannical idiotic charlatans but if you're a keen photographer one of the most troubling questions is black and white or color was an easy question back in the day in the 60s 70s and maybe the 80s if you were a serious match on photographer going into war zones or doing gritty social photojournalism or you were just super cool you would shoot in black and white and color was generally left to the noobs and amateurs and tourist maps black and white was a virtual hallmark of serious professionalism that is no longer the case of course and with digital photography we have the luxury of viewing our images in both color and monotone at least if you're shooting in the raw format which you should be doing these Mapplethorpe flowers are beautiful shot perhaps counter-intuitively in black and white the sensual poetic form of the flower its fragility its texture its lightness its vulnerability is brought out in these black and white images and their color is deemed in essential I generally prefer black and white I always tell people there's more coloring black and white photography I think because I'm more interested in form in light texture pattern the juxtaposition of elements lines planes of tones and perhaps I'm less interested in local color but there are always exceptions and every image should be taken on a case-by-case basis perhaps if we look at some of my own work we can see how the process works more clearly my own work is in the documentary tradition I would say mainly landscapes architecture still life I took this image I think about a month ago now very close to my house you can see why I'm a landscape photographer I live in the re-airs department of the French Pyrenees my house is 3,000 feet altitude so I literally only need to step outside to see this kind of glorious countryside I was interested here in the texture of the landscape that the snow delineates very well I think and also the cloud formations in color is is also interesting I took this image about I think it was half-past eight in the morning so the Sun was just coming up but I've got a problem with sunrises and sunsets I try and avoid them just simply because I just find them too too overdone you know if I never see another orange photograph it will be too soon so even though the color image you know it's not bad I quite like the the subtle yellows and blues of the sky there but what I really wanted to bring out was you know the strong diagonal of that mountain the the peculiar lip like formation of the clouds and the texture of the of the of the trees and the forest they're quite like the strangeness of this image I was going for a walk with my dog as I often do and this thing appeared to float in front of me in fact it's just an old wooden fence post but because at the time of day it must have been late afternoon the Sun was low on the horizon and so the Sun was that the light was hitting it almost horizontally and he gave it this weird shimmering floating quality to it and the color version when the color version works quite well - I like the the the winter tones there of the of the russets and the Browns and the goals and the blue sky but it's a tough call but I think I think on balance I prefer the black-and-white image and it just adds to that sense of strangeness their problems with black and white if you can call it a problem is that it makes everything beautiful that's the reason why all those famous war images by Don McCullen and others are slightly problematic for me because I mean through their their great powerful images there's no question about that but black and white aspetta sizes everything it takes things out of the ordinary out of reality and makes them other if you like it makes them into art objects and you can easily imagine these images in a nice frame hanging in a New York loft rather than making images boring black and white I think does the opposite it helps to make them more beautiful more powerful gives them a graphic force that hits you in the gut it's also problematic because then it becomes the easy option to shoot everything in black and white it's quite difficult to make a bad image in black and white actually because it will always have this graphic gritty quality and it's for that reason I also shoot in color particularly if I want to impart a sort of mundane dreary reality to the photograph or if of course color is integral to the feel of the image

Channel: Still Life - Art and the photographic image

Views: 1,725

Rating: 4.9024391 out of 5

Keywords: photography, art, image, artists, photographers, contemporary art, Mapplethorpe, McCullin, black and white, colour, black and white photography, color photography, Justin Jones, art photography, contemporary photography, war photography

Id: QxDxKMguI-8

Length: 7min 21sec (441 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2017