Project - Black and white

In the previous exercises I experimented with ways of degrading the colour saturation - moving the images towards monochrome.

Monochrome is a bit favourite of mine, which actually started sometime after starting this course. My favourite photographers are William Klein, Henri Cartier Bresson and Robert Capa to name but a few. I also like the work of Daido Moryama and am keen sometime to go out and about like the 'stray dog' is became known as and see what images I could take. Moryama uses quite a spontaneous style of taking images quite quickly as he walks around the streets of Tokyo, I may try this in the future, around the streets of Lincoln!

Black-and-white suffered a gradual decline after the introduction of colour films in the 1960's and 1970's, but digital photography has given it a new creative power. The main difference in the process between digital and film is the point at which your eye has to translate a scene in colour into an image in black-and-white. In film photography that had to occur at the time of shooting, which effectively meant anticipating the image in black-and-white before raising the camera.

With digital photography, the image is actually converted to black-and-white long after shooting, when it is processed on the computer, which makes the situation a little more complex. Some cameras offer the option of image capture in black-and-white, and as long as the red, green and blue channels are retained, there is an imaginative advantage in being able to see the monochrome image immediately on the camera's LCD screen. Otherwise, the main preparatory step in black-and-white photography is being able to 'think' in monochrome. This takes a certain amount of visual training in order to ignore the stimulus of strong colours and concentrate instead on tone, form and light.

Digital technology enables black-and-white photography in two important ways. One is the ease of printing without the need for a wet darkroom with chemical baths - black-and-white has always been a printers medium. The other is the ability to control and fine-tune the tonalities in the finished image, by manipulating the RGB channels. The skills needed are no less than with film and filters, but the means are easier and more accessible.

At this point, it is worth considering at some length the reasons for photographing in black-and-white and its creative value. It does, after all, involve discarding information in a medium - photography - that has always carried with it the sense of recording details of the real world. Basically, why would one want to limit the information?

One reason is that by discarding colour, the eye is persuaded to focus more closely on other image qualities. What we could call the language of black-and-white photography is strongly oriented to the graphic qualities of proportion, line, shape, form and texture.

Renaissance writers on painting such as Cristoforo Landino were accustomed to separating the elements of painting into, for example, rilievo (modelling in the round), compositione (composition), disegno (linear design), and colore (colour). The skills of draughtsmanship, in working with line, shape and volume, were considered to be different in principle from the handling of colour, even though all were combined in an oil painting. Therefore, restricting the palette to eliminate the complex perceptual effect of colour has the effect of concentrating attention on the graphic elements of line, shape, form and texture.

When black-and-white was universal, it was generally understood that the image was in interpretation of a scene into a very specific medium, dominated by tones. What colour photography has done over the decades has been to convince many people that taking a picture is about capturing reality in two dimensions - an illusion, of course, but an effective one.

As will be seen in part four, thinking about the process of shooting digitally brings into question photography's dubious relationship with reality. For now, I must consider how my visual creative thinking might change when I aim for a black-and-white instead of a colour image.