WHAT ARE WE SELLING HERE?

By MICHAEL PERKINS

PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO ARE ALSO BABY BOOMERS learned their craft in a unique pocket of time, a period that saw an astounding series of breakthroughs in the art and science of picture-making. I could make a day of just ticking off aspects of the art that have been revolutionized, miniaturized, re-formatted, re-invented and re-tooled in my lifetime, which tracks from 1952 onward. However, just to zero in on one fundamental change, there is the transition from the last days of the complete dominance of monochrome to the global default to color. It was like learning to chew with baby teeth and then doing your serious, growed-up eating with your “keeper” teeth.

I shot this rusty door in both color and monochrome. In this particular case, mono “sold” the worn texture a little better. It’s all about choices….

When I first picked up a camera, many amateurs had not yet made the jump to color, mostly for economic reasons. B/W was just cheaper. For others, home developing largely involved mono, while color processing tended to be the domain of labs. Black and White was more hands-on, with its various steps and stages serving as a part of an immersive, complete sequence of creativity. And then there was the distrust of color by creatives at the level of an Ansel Adams, who grudgingly worked in color but embraced monochrome, given that, in his opinion, the reproduction science for color work in print had not yet been perfected, and while he could easily control (and predict) the results of his mono images. Given these factors and several others, I, like many others in Boomerville, cut my particular set of baby teeth learning to make acceptable pictures in black and white. My dad, who had an actual job, and thus a little more disposable income to play with, shot in color.

And so, for me, to have lived long enough to enter a third phase, in which black and white has made it through the unofficial runner-up status conferred on it when color first hit its stride…to come out the other side of that time tunnel, newly empowered, newly valued as just one of many valid ways to make a picture…well, it’s exciting. When I shoot now, I frequently toggle between pre-programmed settings profiles for both color and mono, taking several different tonal versions of nearly everything. I can then make a determination, later on, on the major questions in photographic narrative: what are we selling here? What tools get the storytelling most effectively done? What tone, what texture, what range of value will convey what I’m seeking? And, most importantly, can I be open when something I was not seeking comes through by happy chance? I was born a mono kid who became a color shooter as an adult and then came to embrace everything, everyday, all at once as a senior. Lucky.

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