or not?

[cosmicexplosion]

Colour is at the mercy of fashion.
And can clash with it.
Black and white is like style, it's good any where.

[Kirk Gittings]

+1, wholeheartedly. By the way, have you also noticed how the B&W movies were intrinsically deeper in their photography than the color ones?
I just hope Kirk, you do not teach that on those 2 of the 5 best photo schools you like to repeatedly inform us about. Because color can as much be an abstraction element as the lack of it and abstraction is not an automatic equivalent of profundity in art. Never been.

Cheap, laughable shot dude. I teach what I know how to do, and I do what I think. But don't worry I have been cited numerous times by students and faculty for excellence in teaching, and my classes are very popular, as I have said how many times on this thread?-I'm not trying to change anybodies mind. I'm explaining why I shoot b&w.

[hoffner]

Laughable? Sure! The more you beat your breast to give weight to a nonsensical affirmation. Go on.

[Kirk Gittings]

Anyway, enough on this thread. I appreciate all the input and will think about all the advice. Time to move on. Here is another thought many will hate.....

Art is not a tea party. Be real. Be bold. Take risks. I have oftentimes not lived up to that in my long career, but I am 62 now and time is short. Hasta!

[Tin Can]

Exactly, I prefer B&W TV and old movies, raised up on it. Trained eyes from birth. I remember watching Ed Sullivan bring us the Beatles in 1964 on a 8" B&W TV with 3 families watching one TV.

I can see what I like, but I do have trouble producing it.

Kirk,

My gut reaction is that same as yours about black and white. But then there is Jay Maisel, who really makes color work:

http://youtu.be/3U7bnIYcvRM

Jay reminds me that color can be as abstract and thoughtful as black and white while still being done as straight photography.

I suspect that most of us are old foggies who have roots in a black and white world and associations set up by that world. I wonder what black and white means to a generation who has only seen it as intentional art.

[Drew Wiley]

... and why not? You've already got a good commercial track record that should remain sound, Kirk, and probably don't need to prove anything at this point, so why not loosen up and follow your heart?

[dperez]

For me, there are pictures that are best done in color. I prefer B&W when color will not add to the picture, or if it might be too distracting. When shapes or forms are centrally important, I find B&W works better to present these elements. But color can also be powerful and can be important. I don't try to over-think it or get philosophical about it, most of the time when I see a scene I'm instinctively able to tell if it would be best rendered in color or not. Nowadays, I shoot more B&W than I might otherwise due to the cost of 8x10 Kodak Portra 400. Cha-ching!

-Daniel

What do you think of this statement of mine-describing why I prefer B&W photography for my personal work:

[sun of sand]

coarse or inappropriate language will not be tolerated here

man I see foul language in many threads
i usually abbreviate these words but sometimes ..we all know what they are and mean and say them ..most of us say them since a very early age


PUBLISH A LIST OF ACCEPTABLE WORDS
NOT TOLERATED should mean 0
IS THERE SOME QUANTITY A POST CANNOT EXCEED?
ALL foul language should be deleted
NOT UP FOR "moderator calls"
give me a break

not that i give a shit
but wrong


KEN
make it over to that resignation thread
needs attention as I do believe blatently calling someone an idiot is rude/uncivil and an attack on the individual and not their message content
..which while not stated in a very civil manner does have some merit to it
but people are a little too happy to jmp on the hobnob train to acknowledge it

[cps]

Kirk,

Trying to steer this back toward the conceptual discussion about "why black and white", which I have been pondering a bit myself lately.

I shoot both black and white and color. Like many, I feel like color is "hard". But why? I think it's not just the added dimension, I think it's also the strange rarity of it. Color, I mean. This thought first came to me when I browsed the handfuls of color photographs taken by folks like Russell Lee during the FSA era, many of which have a pretty dull palette compared to what we are used to.

But, take a hard look around, not just at the interesting things in your FOV, but at everything. My observation is that, especially if you are out in nature, and you just point your camera around you, pretty much the majority of what you see is going to be a mix of dull browns, greys, greens, and blues. Sky, trees, grass, dirt, old leaves, concrete, rocks, tarmac, clouds. Frankly, the more I look around, the more I notice that there is a lot of not very interesting (to me) color in the world. It's actually pretty hard to find interesting color that pops on screen or film. And, when you get down to it, a lot of the wild colors one encounters are anyway made by the hand of man.

Of course there are plenty of beautiful colors offered up by nature. Wonderful images can be made from a palettle of blue, brown and green. But, an alien trying to learn about our planet by looking at popular Flickr archives might be deeply disappointed to discover upon arrival that the earth is not, in fact, awash in highly saturated explosions of colorful sunsets, turquoise water, flowers, clothing, painted houses, cars etc. I think the success of a Meyerowitz, or a Shore, or an Eggleston is their adeptness at finding the abstraction of color - finding that little moment of color in what is often a fairly drab world - without resorting to taking pictures of flowers, leaves in fall, and sunsets.

I take way too many pictures of flowers, by the way.

So, perhaps one could make the argument that the abstraction of good color photography is no less profound (sorry) than that of black and white, it is just of a different sort. It reflects a kind of extreme selectivity.

Chris

[rdenney]

coarse or inappropriate language will not be tolerated here

man I see foul language in many threads
i usually abbreviate these words but sometimes ..we all know what they are and mean and say them ..most of us say them since a very early age

Sometimes we see it, sometimes we don't. Sometimes, people complain. If you want deterministic enforcement, write a computer program to filter words, like many other forums do. We will continue to do our best to be human here, imperfect though that is. And sometimes, I let posts ride, because they indict the person who posted it far more than my deletion would. But there's a limit to what people should be expected to tolerate.

On the subject: Photographers struggle with words. I'm reminded of one trombonist who, after having been unsuccessful on the audition circuit, took a lesson from the famed Chicago Symphony tuba player and teacher Arnold Jacobs to diagnose the problem. Jacobs told him that he was far more expressive with words than with music, and he should pursue writing rather than musical performance as a profession. The fellow did, becoming a respected local journalist and columnist. So, a photographer who can perfectly describe his imperfect photographs might be in the wrong line of work, versus the photographer whose photographs are perfect but who struggles to say anything about them. I'd rather see great photographs from photographers than great artist statements. Those who do struggle with words should keep it simple, and keep it true, even if they have to acknowledge that they don't know what is true beyond that they like it.

I don't always work in black and white, but I usually do prefer the work I do in black and white, and I think I'm going to have to head back in that direction. I don't think it's because I was raised seeing black and white. I think it's like the difference between charcoals and paints. Each represents a different dimension, and the dimension I see in my black and white prints is closer to what I want to express than the dimension I see in my color prints. But sometimes the color representation is truer to the dimension I want to express, and I'm not always sure which it will be beforehand.

Adams said that color represents a superficial scenery value that is at first attractive, but that does not remain compelling. I suspect that's backed up by Maris's experience. He also said that with black and white, he has more control over the expression than with color, because changes too far from reality in color draw attention to themselves too much. I once photographed the wrought-iron cross on a grave marker at Las Trampas church on the high road from Santa Fe to Taos, using color. Adams had photographed the same cross many decades before (the photo is in Photographs of the Southwest), of course using black and white. My photo showed the black wrought iron and weathered wood as very dark against a bright (blue) sky. Adams's photo showed the sunlight reflecting from those surfaces, and the orange or red filter that he used brightened that reflected light to nearly white, while the sky went very dark. He had therefore exactly reversed the tones of the image, showing it nearly in the negative, but without drawing attention to that reversal as an effect. His bright cross against a dark sky was, to be sure, far more powerful than my dark cross against a light sky. Had I attempted to reverse those tones in color, I would have made the photo, in his words, "obviously unrealistic."

Thus, his justification for using black and white is that it gave him more expressive control without becoming obviously unrealistic.

I think that works for me, too. As soon as I try to describe the expression that control provides, I lose track of it.

Commercial work is often intended to be obviously realistic, and therefore must be in color. For commercial work, the expression of the photographer should probably be submerged well below the expression of whatever is being photographed. But sometimes commercial work more powerfully expresses the product than does color. I'm reminded of a photo that Petronio took of one of his Linhof Technikas for the camera-picture forum, and it was clearly more powerful than the usual color documentary pictures on that forum. It also expressed that the Technika was a camera for tough conditions and tough photographers--an advertising sub-text that was both appropriate and powerful.

Rick "heading over to the resignation thread right now" Denney