FORBIDDEN COLOURS
It’s always been something of a mystery to me as to just why black and white photography somehow lost its perceived value and oomph when colour printing became mainstream.
After all, if you step back half a century or so, black and white imagery has always been at the very core of photography. The grand masters like Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson were seen as artistic geniuses then, and it’s a tag that still very much holds true today.
When I started shooting for a living (in the early 1990s) black and white was still the mainstream page currency for most publications. For my magazine work I always shot in colour transparency film, but for around 75% of the pages of a magazine those images were converted to black and white, as colour pages and their printing were a premium.
However, by the mid-late 90’s magazines were almost all in full colour and the process of reversing a colour image to black and white had become an expensive one. By then, people simply did not want to see black and white and it was almost as
