In my local photographic group we have an esteemed and highly skilled photographer of people. She’s also a teacher. I greatly respect her tenure as a photographer and her level of skill. Her work, specializing in people in their native environments, are beautiful black and whites, made on film, and processed completely by her in the darkroom. She’s been shooting for about 40 years I’d say, and studied with the best.

Well and good, but she’s also of the school that anyone who shoots and prints digitally is to be demeaned, and that B&W is really the only meaningful and true form of photography.

That is, of course, pure bunk. It is also the resistance to change, and it’s been there throughout all the technological changes in photography, as skill developed with the old, only reluctantly gives way to the new.

(I’d have loved to discuss this with her at the meeting, but our format doesn’t allow that.)

Taking the easy one first – criticizing an artist for his choice of tools is just silly. Is Leonardo’s “Pieta” any less a masterpiece because it was cut using a leather mallet instead of a wooden one? Is a painting made inferior because of the use of a camel’s hair brush instead of sable?

What matters is the result – nothing more.

Now, you can get different kinds of results depending on your tools, but that’s a trivial and obvious observation, and leads directly back to the result: if you happen to like the look of film (a bit of grain and softer detail) that’s just fine… but now you’re discussing your response to the art.

I spent 30 years shooting film and 20 years in a traditional darkroom. I switched to digital because, as a tool, it offers me far more creative control, and a superior tonal range in the resulting print.

That’s not surprising… the history of photography, as with most fields, is one of increasing capabilities. Wet negatives to dry; tintype to film; black and white to color; single to multi-element lenses; film to digital.

Criticizing an artists for his choice of tools is, simply, petty.

What’s interesting about this, however, is that on some level, my friend knows this, as, while she rails against all things digital, she also says (of a fellow presenting some of his photos, with long descriptions of his technique) “I don’t want to know all that. Let the photograph speak to me by itself.”

She is hardly the only one to cling to film, and I cannot blame her. She’s spent a lifetime mastering it, and starting anew is very intimidating. And there’s the “old guard” element to it as well.

Clinging to it is just fine by me. It’s an artistic choice, and frankly I’d hate to see the skills needed for film photography fade away. I too like the look… just not to the exclusion of all other forms.

Of course, artists have pooh-poohed one another since the invention of cave drawing, and thus I doubt I’ll have settled much here.

Now, as to “black and white is the only true form of photography.”

“Color photography is about the color” she quoted someone as saying. “If you want to draw a person in and reveal the subject and involve the viewer, then remove the distraction of color and let the essence show through.” (I’m paraphrasing, but that’s basically it.)

And to some extent she’s right. But as a sweeping, all-inclusive statement, she’s wrong, in my opinion.

Color vs B&W is a “non-trivial” discussion, but I’ll say that both are, in a sense, just like the tools I mentioned above: they are a technique used to enhance the final artwork.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way right up front: how powerful would the “Mona Lisa” be in gray-scale? The Sistine Chapel? Monet? Picasso? Miro?

Color is most definitely NOT “about the color.”

Color is how we humans see the world. Removing the color for B&W is an artifice. In fact, in the early history of photography, before the invention of color film, photographers routinely colored their photos, either with a full cast, like cyanotype, or by hand painting.

It harkens back to Greek (and earlier) sculpture. The originals were not bleached white marble, but brightly painted, often with very saturated colored paint. Through the years, the paint wore off, leaving the raw marble exposed.

I find a strong parallel between how we came to think of the white statues as “true art” and how we came to think of B&W as “true photography.” B&W merely came first.

Why is the subject complex? Because while we live in a world of color, we do not get most of our information about that world from the color part of it; we get it from it’s brightness – luminosity… the Black and White part.

Try this experiment: take a color image into Photoshop, and then convert it to LAB space. Turn off the luminosity channel, leaving only the color, and you’ll very likely not be able to even see the image. Flip that, turning on luminosity and off both color channels, and the image will be perfectly recognizable.

That simple experiment explains why B&W photography works at all, and goes a long way toward explaining my friend’s correct assertion that “if you want the essence of it, you’ll find it in B&W.”

But the fact is that B&W is a technique, an artifice, as I said before. That it succeeds is not in doubt. Some photographs cry out for a B&W interpretation precisely because color distracts from the point the photographer is trying to make.

Would Dorthea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” have failed as a color photo? I think not, but it’s certainly more bleak as a B&W, where the lack of color not only emphasizes the woman’s plight, but the very mood of her times. And it’s that last, the mood, that adds the extra kick to that photograph.

On the other hand, look at Steve McCurry’s “Afghan Girl.” That photo certainly carries the same visceral impact as “Migrant Mother” but is in full color. In B&W, the impact is lost.

Would Steichen’s “Flat Iron Building” have worked in color? I think it might have been better in color, since the dim lighting conditions would have severely muted the colors and thus drawn the view further in.

Some photos call out for color, and some for B&W – it depends on the piece and the artist’s intent. There is no one answer; one is not “better” than the other.

My own “Tree with Cloud” makes a great B&W, but was (as a digital image) taken in color. The sky was bright blue. Printed in color, it would indeed have been “color about color” … which is why I chose to print it without color.

When I create art using the photographer’s toolkit, everything I choose affects the final viewing impact. Besides the initial perspective, time, depth of field, shutter speed, focus and other choices made during the actual capture, there is : Matte paper or luster? Optical brighteners or none? Surface texture? Color or B&W? Saturation? Contrast? High key or low? Sharp or soft? What grain size, if any? Printed small, medium or huge? Matted to the edge or with a border?

All of these, and more, are dictated to my particular sensibilities as an artist by the image itself. Others would make different choices.

In fact, I tend to think that professing that “only B&W; only film” demeans our art form, and brings it perilously close to a craft instead. I can think of no good coming from reducing an artist’s choices.

My friend is passionate about her art-form and her choices, and that too is a good thing, for passion drives art. But that doesn’t mean I have to agree with her.

It is, after all, art.