16. Thoughts on exclusively taking black-and-white photos

For the past year, I have shot most of my photographs and projects exclusively in monochrome. Photographers who shot most of their life’s work with the use of black-and-white film are some of my favorite references for lighting and composition and act as a source of inspiration for my personal work. Learning to see the world with no color has taught me to see it in a different way, and search for more unlikely scenes, which I wouldn’t find interesting if I shot color images instead. 

There are a few things I want to address about shooting exclusively in black-and-white, which might affect you as a photographer. Your portfolio will look very artistic, and you don’t need to put in much effort in order to match the look of your photos. However, not all black-and-white photography is the same. Each photo differs in the natural contrast of the scene, and whether the image taken was over or under-exposed. That way, in post-production, each image can be edited to a unique visual style. You can go for sharp contrasty images or less contrast and more grain. With that, you can try to emulate different films used in analog photography. 

Secondly, not every photo is meant to be turned into shades of gray. For me, there was a lot of trial and error when I first tried shooting black-and-white as it can be difficult to find scenes that work better for monochrome than color. Instead of searching for contrast in colors, you need to exclusively look for differences in lighting and search for interesting reflections and shadows. In a way, your philosophy of taking photos changes completely, and when I tried making color images after a while I felt lost, as the learning curve is completely different. In a way, I forgot how to combine colors as I predominantly relied on light and shadow. 

Taking color away from a photo is essentially taking away valuable information, which helps us humans decipher the message the photo is trying to convey. That way, we feel more lost and alienated when looking at a black-and-white photo, and we need to find visual cues in other aspects of the photo such as composition, shape, and contrast. For that reason, turning a photo into monochrome should be done with intention and not solely because that is your signature style as a photographer. When doing that with the right photo, the effect can be more dramatic and emotional as well.

Some of my clients asked me whether I only shoot black and white, which really made me think about my philosophy as a photographer. I prefer black-and-white photos simply because that's what I imagine when I think of what photography means for me. Most of the images I look up to are quite old and were made long before the invention of color-negative film. However, there are some photographers who used color and whose work I really enjoy studying, such as Henry Gruyaert, Alex Webb, and Saul Leiter. I’m looking forward to becoming better at using color in my work as well. 

Another aspect of color that I find perplexing is that the colors you perceive can change depending on when you are looking at the image. Sometimes it can look too warm, and sometimes a bit too cold. So editing is a process of small adjustments until you make the colors just right. There is no single right way to edit a color palette of the photo, but rather an infinite number of different possibilities. My question is how to choose the correct one, which will most clearly communicate what the photo is trying to tell the viewer. With black-and-white photography, that step of iteration in the editing process is not necessary and makes life a little bit easier. 

So if a single person, in this case, a photographer sees colors differently according to the time they are looking at an image, what about multiple people? Do I see green in the same way as others? Or might I perceive it as blue, but simply call it green because that’s how I was instructed to call this color when I was a child? In that way, color is not something that is universally defined, but rather agreed upon. I believe black-and-white photos are perceived more similarly across multiple viewers, however, studies show that might not be the case.

The Inuit language, for example, has fewer terms for colors but more terms for shades of white, because they spend most of their lives hunting in the snow and ice. So the question is whether we actually see the world differently, or we just use different terms to describe the same things that surround us.