The New Color: The Return of Black-and-White

If any-one's interested, a somewhat interesting essay by Charlotte Cotton (plus my minor blathering about it)

http://photo-muse.blogspot.com/2007/...and-white.html

http://www.tipofthetongue.org/main.html?id=0

plenty of ammo for everyone...

I read the article, and I'm on the fence about her summation- that "a time when photography's value as a contemporary way of seeing is to be questioned" is upon us. I think photographic imagery is still very much currency of the realm in this day and age, but the methods of its production and display are in flux. The advent of cellphone cams and digital video are certainly changing the medium, but I don't think that photo-captured imagery (as opposed to CGI-rendered) will cease relevance. So much of our common cultural language is now spoken through recorded images. To remove photographic imagery from world culture today would be like trying to remove Latinate words from the English language.

Isn't it odd that a pen and ink drawing by a good artist draws no less praise than the oil painting in full color. But when the discussion turns to photography? B&W seems to become an orphan child. Personally, I prefer black and white. Always have....always will. But that's just me, daring to express my opinion.

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Originally Posted by Michael Graves

Isn't it odd that a pen and ink drawing by a good artist draws no less praise than the oil painting in full color...

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Is that true? What artists today are making waves with pen and ink drawings?

Not posing a rhetorical question ... i'm curious if anyone knows of examples.

I agree, Michael. To me, there's nothing comparable to a finely executed B&W print. Color has it's
place, of course, and I'm not knocking it. The wow factor, for me, will always be black and white, though.

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Originally Posted by paulr

Is that true? What artists today are making waves with pen and ink drawings?

Not posing a rhetorical question ... i'm curious if anyone knows of examples.

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Comix, graphic novels, etc.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Michael Graves

Isn't it odd that a pen and ink drawing by a good artist draws no less praise than the oil painting in full color. But when the discussion turns to photography? B&W seems to become an orphan child. Personally, I prefer black and white. Always have....always will. But that's just me, daring to express my opinion.

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Just another observation, but I have come across art historians and painting faculty (university setting) who praise a historic/established painter's paintings, but snub the same artist's etchings as being unimportant. So I am not quite sure your point is correct. That, along with the another concept I have heard of...that the critique of art is in itself an art form, has made me wonder about the the general ability of university art historians to actually think critically.

My apologies to any art historians here, but I get the impression that the university art history programs tend to churn out mental lemmings.

Vaughn

I just finished listening to this while working on some silver gelatin prints in my darkroom. I am not sure what to think just yet.

My impression is that Ms. Cotton's opinions and positions are heavily "colored" by her choice of occupation, that of curator for modern art museums and galleries. Is it any suprise then that her primary concerns are about fashion: "I had doubts, of course, about photography's moment in art's spotlight." Translated: will it fly off the wall into the homes of the rich and dedicated followers of this week's Statement?

I am struck by her lack of emphasis on the process of creation, as if the only reason analog/b&w photographers keep working in the medium is nostalgia. "Reveling in the auratic propensity of monochrome photographic thinking is perhaps not an unreconstructed Modernist impulse any longer, but rather a true reaction to the axis shift in the way we look at photography in light of digital." If I understand this statement correctly, it appears she has decided that b&w photographers are either old dinosaurs or archly ironic pseudo-Luddite avant gardists, playing the audience for subterranean echoes of memory. Everything must refer to previous works: "Susan Lipper's .... fictional version of the American road trip was a signpost to me as to how relevant a contemporary black-and-white vision could be. Somehow, Lipper managed to combine the classic Robert Frank-ian pictures-just-waiting-to-happen with the tangible sense of her own photographic discovery....So, too, is the comment upon warfare by An-My Lê, which utilizes the aesthetics and rhetoric of the earliest war photography by Roger Fenton at the Crimean War or the graphic portrayal of America's Civil War by George Barnard."

Is that what goes through your mind when you set up and take a shot? Do you intentionally make your work to comment on art history? I'm not that clever, I'm not a curator at MoMA. I can't even figure what she means here:

"While I think that the jury is still out as to whether more than a sophisticated minority can intuit the difference between an active and unreconstructed pastime of homemade abstract photography and the critical rethinking of a sidelined process, this is hardly a criticism to level at this artist's intentions....You can choose to see such a gesture of unique happenstance as essentially formal or as the ascendance of strategies that resist and confound the de-politicized, decorative tsunami of photography-as-art that we are currently submerged beneath."

It sounds rather elitist, whatever she said. But she is a virtuoso with words.

Who cares. I wonder if she ever took a photograph? Not that it matters.

I do what I do because I like it. I used to photograph in color, when it wasn't cool. Now I photograph in B&W when it isn't cool, so I guess I am not with the in crowd. Darn, no sleep tonight. Big Color prints are in today and out tomorrow, who knows what will be next, maybe tiny little 35mm contact prints.