So why a series of colour photos? I think we need to place that responsibility firmly with Batsceba 🙂 After all, 95% of my pictures are in black and white, every picture in the ‘After the Coal Dust’ book is black and white, every picture in every exhibition has been in black and white.
I think I find it easier to answer ‘why not colour’.
I have several reasons, mostly serving to highlight my failings as a photographer.
Firstly, I find it easier to group images thematically if they’re black and white. I find I have no proper style in colour. Sometimes the highly saturated ‘Martin Parr style’ seems appropriate and yet I instinctively prefer the muted darks of a Rembrandt painting. So I end up with a mish-mash of images that don’t tie in together.
Secondly, the photographers I admired were almost exclusively black and white, the Bill Brandt, DonMcCullin type of heavily printed dramatic images.
I grew up in a ‘black and white’ town, terraced houses and coal mines. There didn’t seem to be much room for colour.
Way back, I used to have quite a well-equipped darkroom. A condenser enlarger and open trays for black and white, a diffuser enlarger and print drums for colour. I rarely used the colour setup. It lacked the tactile quality of monochrome and I realised I couldn’t really afford the colour paper and chemicals. Plus, I wasn’t very good. I could manage the odd Cibachrome print (I still have a few) but printing from colour negs was a chore. It seemed logical to shoot more black and white. And the more you do so, the more you begin to see in black and white. It becomes the natural order of things.
And, of course, there are the prosaic reasons. I’m too tight to pay for a pair of high quality, colour-managed monitors. Nor do I have the patience to carefully balance colours. Black and white covers a multitude of sins.
I think sometimes colour can even be a distraction. If we see a photograph of someone in a red coat, for example, we notice the colour red before we see the person. For me, unless colour adds something extra, some extra emotion or greater context, why use it?
And yet, every (digital) picture I take has both a colour and black and white version – often several versions of each. In fact, the ‘100 faces’ project started off as a colour project. the early mockups showed a hundred coloured faces. But they didn’t seem to work together, so it became yet another black and white project.
So here we have it, a random selection of colour images that most likely don’t sit well together. In all probability a good advertisement for my black and whites.
John Gill (May 2024)
