The Black and White Advantage

There’s nothing quite like the solitude of my darkroom at dawn, the hum of my enlarger in the background, and the image slowly appearing on paper in my hands. For me, photography is more than capturing a moment—it’s a meditative journey into light, shadow, and form.

It’s three a.m. Something by Bach or Mozart is playing softly in the background. An image of “Morning Light on the Towers, Needles District” is slowly appearing on the piece of paper as I gently massage it in a tray of chemicals under the soft amber glow of a safelight. The fan of my enlarger hums softly in the background. In my mind, this is what photography is all about. This is, for me, after all, a solitudinal endeavor. I create in an atmosphere of quietude—quietness and solitude. It’s where I think best, both in the field and in my darkroom, and where I can concentrate most readily. In fact, to a great degree, I lose track of time. It is with purpose, then, that there are no clocks in my quiet, dark workspace.

Months earlier, I had carried my backpack of over fifty pounds into the early morning darkness in search of this and other images. After scouting this place the previous evening, I thought I knew where I wanted to be the next morning, pre-sunrise. I thought I could get a promising composition, but you never know for sure until you are there and in the moment. I quickly set up my camera, field edited the composition, determined the exposure I thought would yield the best results, and waited for the sun to make its morning appearance. When the sun was in the right position, including a setting moon, I exposed the film. From there, the piece of film was transported to my darkroom, processed by hand, and proofed, and now I am in the process of extracting the image I know is hiding inside the negative.

Creating and printing great, even good, black-and-white photography demands a commitment. It is not for the weak of heart, weak of knee, or the uncommitted! The reward for all this effort is an image on the wall whose highlights softly reflect image detail and whose shadows glow in subtlety. They almost always evoke an emotional response. You can’t simply “take them or leave them.”

A primary task in black-and-white photography is to remove unneeded and unnecessary elements. Black-and-white photography is, by nature, a more abstract medium than color. Removing color from the equation allows one to reduce the scene being portrayed to its most basic elements, removing the thing that most often interferes with understanding the material: color.

In reality, a photograph isn’t really black and white, though that is what we call it. A great black-and-white photograph can have a range of tones that go from very dark, or very, very dark, with detail but not black, to tones that are very light, approaching what we call paper-base white, but not an absolutely white white, with no detail. Black-and-white photography is a medium unto itself and should not, as often happens, be an afterthought or the byproduct of a color photograph that isn’t good in color. Chances are, if it’s bad in color, it’ll be bad in black and white too. I work in black and white as a purposeful action, and because I do photograph that way, mainly using black-and-white film, the decision in the field and at the time of exposure is to create a black-and-white image for my wall or someone else’s wall.

(By the way, and for what it’s worth, I will be publishing an article in the near future about a method I use for making my black-and-white images when I start with a digital original. There are times when using a large-format film camera isn’t practical. More on that later.)

This image was done using a Canon 6D camera and a Canon 24-105mm lens. Phenomena like this change and disappear very quickly, so I grabbed the camera and tripod that were closest to me at the moment. The black-and-white conversion was done completely using Photoshop.

For me, black and white has a much greater capability for self-expression than a color image, but that’s probably more a matter of personal preference. Since black-and-white photography is my background, it is my usual default position. Working with black-and-white film means I have to really slow down and consider what I am portraying. I spend all my focus in that moment on the composition I am building. It requires me to concentrate on the light: how does it fall across the subject? What is the pattern of light? I almost always want a very organized pattern of light, and getting that requires me to pay close attention to the details of the composition—form, shadow and highlight, texture, and how the elements work together or against each other to form a cohesive image without the distractions of hyper-saturated or desaturated colors.

There is a much greater opportunity in black and white for an object to “morph” into a “what is it,” losing all sense of scale or proportion. Being reduced to pure form and elements of design enables the art and artist to produce images that are emotionally evocative.

I place these two photographs in proximity, and I title them together as "Entanglement." Even though they are over a thousand miles apart—more like 1,500 miles—there are great similarities, and part of what I try to do is to see those similarities and show them. When a photographic artist goes into the field to produce traditionally processed black-and-white images, especially when using large-format cameras, they must, of necessity, be very observant. I move very slowly, especially in new territory with previously unknown material, trying to be as focused as possible on the material I might want to portray. (With the image on the right side, there was a guy standing nearby who was frustrated by not seeing anything, only complaining and wanting to talk about camera junk. But there they were... photographs, and I didn’t have time to talk. He remarked that I was pretty rude, but I question who the rude one really was.) I have mentioned the necessity to slow down greatly when working this way. In fact, I enter almost a meditative state where an image begins revealing itself to me, almost intuitively. I enter a zone and honestly don’t hear people nearby chattering away about nothing. The process demands that I pay attention to my material—the art side—and then pay attention to technical details—the technical or craftsmanship side.

When the Whole World Is Digital, Why Still Analog?

I am not anti-technology. Indeed, in my commercial work, I do work in a digital environment, and it serves me well. What I also know is that working using traditional methods and materials keeps a connection between me and the classic photographers alive. Working as I do, using large cameras and black-and-white film, requires me to slow down. A very hard workday—from before first light until after the sun is down and it is semi-gloom—might yield a dozen different and unique exposures on a good day. Most often, there will be only four or five exposures.

A good photographer, working very hard, may be able to produce 12 significant works in a year’s time. Quite a departure from current thinking that all I have to do to produce better photographs is to get the latest and greatest camera body and lens, and I’ll automatically get better photographs. Not when the weakest link in the equation is you! I believe that until you really, really know your material, your camera and film, and what they will do under varying conditions, any really good photographs you produce are more a product of chance than of your creative eye and developed technique.

Each successive iteration of a photograph that I process in my darkroom is the result of decisions made about the previous version. An initial print is made, based on my best judgment about that negative. When it is pulled from the fixer, it is placed on a sheet of Plexiglas and moved to an area for evaluation. It is examined to determine whether it’s too light, too dark, or just right; the initial print seldom is “just right.” What about the level of contrast? Is there too much or too little? Are there areas of the print that need to have the level of contrast increased or lowered, made lighter, or maybe burned down? All of these factors have to be evaluated before a final print is arrived at. Then, once these questions have been answered and a solution arrived at, it is time to produce the final print. Provided I have recorded all the steps correctly and executed all of them perfectly, perhaps ten or more tries later, the image is arrived at.

However, no matter how hard I try to make the perfect photograph, it is probably an elusive objective. Mistakes are an unavoidable part of the process. The foibles, errors, and emotions become part of the final photograph. They are an inextricable part of the equation. That is one of the things that separates a hand-printed black-and-white photograph from one that is produced digitally. When you see a photograph hanging on a wall and you see the small errors—maybe a black speck caused by a piece of dust that was inside a film holder, or a small white scratch on the image caused by film damage—you can know, at that time, that this is a hand-printed photograph. As much as we work to eliminate these things, they will always be there because this photograph was produced at the hands of the artist.