THE BEAUTY OF BLACK & WHITE

I love black and white photography. If it wasn’t for the demands of my clients I’d only work in monochrome and publish all my books filled with B+W images. Take a look at Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis book and luxuriate in over 500 pages of gorgeous black and white imagery of the highest calibre – inspirational to say the least!

But why? What is it about monochrome imagery that appeals so strongly in a time of amazingly rich and technically perfect colour photography? Prints have never been so vibrant, and even TVs can now show colours that even exceed what the eye can see.

As I see it, there are three principal factors at play here.

Firstly, there’s nostalgia for times past. Black and White was the only game in town for much of photography’s early history. Colour photography only became mainstream in the 1930s with Kodak’s “You take the photo, we do the rest” slogan but colour photography had been possible since the late 19th century. In the beginning, colour photography was really tricky and so the vast majority of photography from the 1870s onwards was based on a monochrome emulsion with film