STATEMENT / SUGGESTION

By MICHAEL PERKINS

PHOTOGRAPHY CAN BE INCREDIBLY DIRECT as a means of conveying visual information. The terms of certain images are bare, even stark, with subtlety sacrificed in the service of immediacy. Some of the greatest pictures ever made tell their stories in very clear and simple terms. Nothing, for example, can surpass the power of the grainy immediacy of the photos taken of the explosion of the Hindenburg. Smack. Wham. No detours, all force, everything arriving in the now.

The choice between black-and-white and color in pictures is often a choice between that sharp, sudden newsfoto impact and a slower, more layered appeal to the senses. Scenic titles, at least over the last one hundred years, have seemed to cry out for a wide array of hues versus rendering the same subjects in variant tones of the same single color, or monochrome, and so color has become the default choice for several generations of shooters, with mono reserved for special effects or moods. We have developed an innate sense that, for certain “beautiful” things, shooting in a narrow range of tones is somehow “less than”…less than real, less than splendorous, less than lovely.

But do we have to automatically accept this proposition? Can monochrome images convey their own unique idea of beauty, equal to or even superior to color-splashed tableaux? Having been raised on mono from my first days with a camera (mostly an economic choice, given that color, while certainly popular, was pricey), I learned to work within what I then regarded as a constrictive box of narrow options, imaging how much better this or that would look in color. Now that color is the general default, I almost feel as if I must prove that a given shot would work better without it…that is, I have to have some kind of “note from teacher” to justify mono’s use, as if, of course, you need to shoot this in color, unless you’ve made the case to do otherwise.

Strange.

Photographers are often needlessly neurotic, of course, and so most of our “problems” are of our own making, but that’s the creative process for ya. I long ago formed the habit of clicking between pre-loaded recipes of settings, shooting multiple versions of more and more subjects, especially the ones that are “supposed” to be in color. Snapping off an additional exposure in mono costs me nothing and often affords me the chance to….what else..?….have yet another unresolvable argument with myself.

I really must seek therapy some day……..