Color v Black and White and Is Photography Art?
Nothing inherent in the nature of photography makes it imperative that the photographer photograph in either black and white or color.
Color photography is as pure a form of photography as is black and white.
A great color photograph is as great as a great black and white photograph because in each one the photographer has used his/her materials and instrument, has handled his/her subject and has expressed his/her vision greatly.
It is always the picture that justifies the process. It is never the other way around.
Black and White photography, which is a graphic medium, is related to drawing, which is also a graphic medium.
Color photographs are related to watercolors, pastels, and paintings, which are color mediums.
Black and white pictures are made up of tonal values, color pictures of tonal values plus hues.
The photographer with a graphic sensibility and who sees in terms of lines and values will work in black and white. The photographer who joins a color sensibility to a graphic one and who sees in hues and well as in tonal values will work in color.
One can only hope that any given photographer knows what his/her sensibility is and chooses the appropriate medium.
As for photography and art:
Photography is no more an art than is language or sound or the body's physical movement.
It's what the individual photographer does with photography that creates a work of art, just as what the writer does with language creates the poem, what the composer and musician do with sound creates the musical composition and what the choreographer and the dancer do with the body's physical movement creates the dance.
"You taught me language," says Caliban, the monster, to Prospero, the magician, in Shakespeare's
The Tempest
You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
But it was Shakespeaare who turned his cursing into poetry and made Prospero's reply the greater, more eloquent cursing.
"I don't do very much, really," said the great Hungarian photographer Andre Kertesz to me one day. "Nature begins the thing and I complete it, that's all."
"What thing?" I asked.
"The picture," Kertesz said.
But to make pictures as great as his (and he made great pictures in both black and white and color) one has to know what a picture is, has to see nature (the world) begin a picture and has to know how to complete it.
For this, Kertesz began practicing photography, without a camera, at the age of 8, by making a rectangle with his thumbs and forefingers, bringing it quickly to his eye, framing something with it and making a noise or gesture to indicate the moment of exposure. Over and over again, several times a day, every day.
He began playing hookey at the age of twelve to go downtown Budapest to the Hungarian National Museum and, in the study rooms (yes, at the age of 12) study prints, drawings, fabric, paintings, folk art of various kinds, etc. (The curators, he said, thought it was charming to see a young boy so passionate about art and helped him all they could.)
By the time he was fifteen, with his painter and sculptor friends he was poring over all the monthly avant-garde art magazines from Moscow, Berlin and Paris; going to first-night performances by the avant-garde Hungarian composers Bartok and Kodaly; and, at night, haunting the Budapest literary cafes where Andre Ady and other avant-garde Hungarian poets gathered and where Ady wrote most of his verse.
He bought his first camera at the age of 18 and made a small Constructivist masterpiece with the third exposure.
He was a very good Cubist and Constructivist photographer by the time he was 20 and in some pictures predicted Surrealism some years before the movement was born.
So it's no wonder that he knew what a picture was, could see one forming in the world and knew how to complete it. No wonder, either, that in his late 80s and early 90s he could construct beautiful color still lifes of small objects and make beautiful Polaroid SX-70 color still-life pictures of them
yrs
ben
www.benlifson.com