My Favorite Black and White Photographers Working Today
And photos from a B&W assignment for WIRED
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Many people assume that I dislike black and white photography. That's probably a result of me referring to it as art sauce, including it on my list of Don’ts in A Somewhat Serious Guide to Photography’s Do’s and Don’ts, and naming it a culprit for artificial nostalgia in street photography. The topic has become a trigger point for photographers who are quick to defend monochrome and extoll its merits. My contrarian goblin rises up to the challenge, and sometimes things get heated. The truth is, I don’t have any issues with black and white as an aesthetic and I want to set the record straight.
I love black-and-white photography.
When done well.
My gripe with B&W is its unfortunate distinction of serving as a band-aid to a panoply of technical and conceptual issues, making it the most misused and overused of all photography devices. Black and white is both easy and very hard. It accomplishes its goal of transforming a mediocre photograph into an aspirational one, winking in the direction of “art.” At the same time, it is more difficult to create memorable work in black and white than in color. Color strengthens the composition and adds a layer of visceral emotion. Once stripped of it, the photo relies solely on subject, contrast and composition, and if any of these are wonky, the image falls apart.
Black and white also makes it harder to develop a signature style. Many photographers are recognized by their color palettes — the saturated Kodachrome of Alex Webb or the cyan hues of Nadav Kander. Turning those images black and white would make them indistinguishable from hundreds of other superficially similar photos. A style is a unique combination of visual layers. Taking away color makes it that much harder for the other elements to come together in an idiosyncratic combination that becomes the photographer’s language.
Many of my favorite photographers worked in B&W — Helmut Newton, Francesca Woodman, Larry Fink, just to name a few. Because all of them were shooting on film, color was never an option. When I asked Larry Fink why he shot exclusively in black and white, he told me this, "The reason I didn't shoot in color is because it's another criteria which gets away from my original criteria…I didn't want to include color because it was another element which I didn't think I could handle". For anyone using digital, the choice is theirs to make after the photo is taken, and that decision shouldn’t come lightly.
A few weeks ago, WIRED asked me to shoot Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal. Caveat: the photos had to be B&W for their dedicated monochrome column, the Big Interview. Discarding color during the shoot is a much different experience than doing so in post-production. The lack of choice focuses the vision on contrasts and textures that play a much bigger role than when shooting in color. It was a fun exercise.
In this newsletter, I am highlighting current photographers whose work is both structurally and conceptually stunning in black and white, leaving no room for the doubt of color.
Disclaimer. As I was making the list, I realized that most of the people working in monochrome today are men. I couldn't think of many women who make black and white their own, especially in the documentary realm. Could it be that men are more prone to carry on the romantic ideals of the masters and prefer their photos more epic and saturated with the conception of “art”? I will leave this question open-ended.
Black and white, enigmatic images evoking Man Ray have been done to death, but Jack constructs a surrealist language that feels uniquely personal. His portraits are always emotional and often eerie, and his use of hands is masterful. Hands are really, really hard to include in the composition in a way that doesn’t look awkward. Jack’s portfolio is a study in how it’s done
Philip’s off-camera flash brings out a delicious contrast of light and shadows and introduces a theatrical quality to his work. His documentary photos are brilliant at stripping away noise and highlighting the emotional gravity of the subject without the use of artifice.
Kathy’s Office Romance, photographed inside the New York Times building, plays with spatial proportions, melding together subjects, objects, and details into a joyful ode to her workspace. The photos echo the stark contrasts of Ray Metzker and strip away color to reveal a luminous chessboard of architecture, light, and shadow.
I love Kooiker’s work despite all my preconceptions of sepia as art sauce. The photos (taken on iPhone!) dissect the human body into limbs, winking at both Man Ray and Guy Bourdin, and are unsettling, fetishistic, and beautiful.
Alex pushes shadows to their limit in his nearly all-black photos that remind me of Goya’s dark painting. Highly stylized photos of war zones and disaster areas often feel exploitative. Alex manages to escape that unfortunate distinction through the use of negative space that highlights the tragedy of the scene without over-exposing the people portrayed.
If I missed a photographer who is currently working in B&W and whose work you love, please leave in comments!
WIRED interview with Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal
My Last Conversation with the Late, Great Larry Fink
A Somewhat Serious Guide to Photography Do’s and Don’ts
Find me on Instagram @dina_litovsky
A press-photographer friend of mine once told me there was an old adage - 'If the light's shite, go black and white' His tongue was firmly in his cheek, and was a brilliant photographer regardless of the medium or camera, but I think there are rather too many people that stick to that idea religiously with varying levels of success!
Very interesting, but 'dem is fighting words'.... ;0) As a black and white film photographer, it seems to me that perhaps the push of a button to post haste turn a lovely color file to black-and-white in the digital realm is perhaps efficient, but hardly ideal. Anecdotally, I am reminded of how new applicants to the Magnum Agency were asked by Cartier-Bresson to bring only contact sheets, which he proceeded to look at upside down. He was not interested in subject, but in composition, tone, shadows and the graphic language of the image. Perhaps this quote, from a Canadian 'Master', the recently passed news photographer, and one of the first to shoot 35mm, Ted Grant: “When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”