Color vs black and white photography: Quick historic look

Black and white photography first started as a necessity. It then became the ordinary acceptable and only choice, and later it turned into a creative one. It is now more associated with the fine art medium than is color, and there is no surprise there. It has become a means of representing and transferring one’s own and unique inner vision of the external world to the others through a medium that is limited in characteristics, rather than just portraying things the way they are, and probably that’s the very reason it is considered to be more of an art form than the rest.

For many decades, black and white had been the only  option for documentary photography and reportage (which were more or less the main criteria to benefit from photography back then). Even after color film became available, the high sensitivity of black and white film and the ease of manufacturing it along with the ability to significantly push it even higher during development in contrast to color film made sure to keep color from being widely adopted by the masses, especially in this area of photography where spontaneity and quick reaction were a must for facts and events to be recorded just in time to be transferred to the rest of the world to view. Thus it was vastly accepted as a form of natural and true portrayal of ongoing conditions and happenings.

With the advancements in color chemicals and later in digital technology in general, more and more people started taking this medium as the new way of documenting, if not their professional tasks, their daily lives and special events and holidays. Photography became open to the public, but for some black and white maintained its traditional (and long accepted) values.

At the beginning some photographers actually defended black and white as the one and only way to go, and resented how photography transformed from being an acquired skill of just a few to a practice open to anyone and everyone. For some, it meant having to let go of their well-established knowledge and experience and coming to terms with the new way things became having to start their learning process all over again to accommodate the new demands. For others however, they came around this new practice and actually made the best of both their previous knowledge and the new opportunities that became then open to them to move forward and even excel once more.

Maybe the main downside to Color, for some photographers, is that it can easily pull the attention away from the original meaning and purpose of a particular image to a completely different one. This is not to say that color is bad, this is just stating the facts so you can evaluate (and help your viewers evaluate, so to speak) the real message behind your photograph.

Vibrant saturated colors can very easily steal the spotlight away from the more important elements of a particular image, while working within a more restricted palette means putting more emphasis on the true nature and value of a given image. So the choice between color or black and white rests entirely in the photographer’s hands, and how they would go about pulling their viewers’ attention to different parts of their image.

This fact is well known to many photographers out there, who in turn choose to exploit the effects of saturated colors by the little under-exposure of their scenes, or in contrast those who limit themselves to a more restricted color palette. Again, this is entirely the artist’s choice and how they would like to present their work to their audience.