The Monochrome Photgrapher's palette

I know, photography has been calling for years about its separatedness from painting, but it's still a 2D imaging medium, objectively speaking. I was pondering about a way to summarize the monochrome photo "palette," i.e. the sum of recognizable pictorial elements that photographers manipulate to make a photographic picture. Most of the books explain proper exposure in detail, but I was interested in the pictorial building blocks we recognize and manipulate in a picture. I came up with the following:

Composition
Subject matter
Purpose

Angle of view (wide, normal, tele)
Areas of focus (bokeh vs. detailed areas)
Perspective (controlled by view camera movements)

Grain size
Grain density
Sharpness
Gradations
Contrast (global, local, micro; lith contrast)
High-key/Low-key tonal arrangement
Tonal mapping (i.e. the impact of filters+film in mapping the colored world to the monochrome space, and what it does on our perception of the depicted elements)
Tone of image (warm/neutral/cold/sepia for normal metal halide; blue for cyanotype, etc)

Size of print
Paper base color
Paper finish/texture
Print reflectance range

Mounting/framing material

Exhibition context


In monochrome, there is a wealth of different materials that constitute the toolchain, but what I wanted to do was to list a vocabulary to describe the content of a photo. You can achieve a high contrast with all sorts of materials, but in the end it's still a high contrast. All of the above elements are variables that are constitutive of a photo, and are the end result of an entire process. What do you think is missing?

 

Roger and Alan, you are right, but I wasn't going to try and catch the "essence of art" type of thing here, just humbly cataloguing the toolbox. I've always found that books on photography explain only exposure and contrast control, without showing how to manipulate the other variables in a picture.

For example, wouldn't it be nice to have "The Book of Grain", a compendium of reproducible film grain patterns, as they are produced by various film/developer combinations? There must be a core set of effects that are reproducible, despite all the variations.

I just thought that the palette of painter is something that artists and historians took time to understand and analyze properly; photography still shrouds itself in the mystery of instinct and daylight tanks.

It's like music: knowing theory won't make you a great composer, but we can safely say that 99% percent of music is made out of clear concepts like scale, tone, chords, progression, rythm, etc. There is still a "mystery", which is the Gestalt effect of interpretation and all the contingent factors, but it does not alone music make. Photography is not built out of luck alone either.

Ansel Adams defined the tonal scale of photography with the Zones; I'm interested about defining keys, chords, timbre, and orchestration.

 

Dear Roger, excellent reality check, so let me try to refine my point.

Perhaps the exact nature of grain in a negative is so contingent that you can't reproduce it all the time. But you'll also agree that each brushtroke in a painting is unique as well. Yet, we still have a way to describe it, to qualify and interpret it, as well as to direct the learner in how to make it.

I don't think one could go down to scientifically accurate reproductible results in every case, but you can't say either that it's random. Otherwise grain would be fine one day and coarse the other.

I know, my whole point here is rather academic, but sadly, I AM an academic...

 

Hi Roger,

I think we're getting closer to where I wanted to get this thread. The first important item, on which we agree, is that it's not random. I will try to clarify a little more my concept of palette here.

When we look at a photograph, and we wish to describe its content, we can approach it from two opposite directions. The first direction is that of the viewer. The viewer sees a finished picture, and can say things such as:

* Cold tone
* Lots of grain
* Diagonal composition
* Square format
* Portrait of a woman

Those are rough categorizations, but they are meanigful and stable. Pretty much anyone else who sees that same picture would concur with these statements. Those are not purely trivial detail either (as "it's a photo"), and they give important information that can help determine a photograph's meaning.

The second direction is that of the maker (makers, if there are lab assistants). From the point of view of the production of a photo, there are a number of choices made at every step in the production. In the same hypothetical case I described above, the photographer(s) would go through such stages as:

* What subject? a woman friend
* What pictorial approach? A gritty look
* What means to achieve this intention?

That last statement is where I see the "palette." The answer to that question is NOT "Tri-X in Rodinal 1+50 8 mins, enlargment 4x on Ilford MGIV dev'd in Harman Coldtone for 2 mins." Such an answer is highly dependent on one's workflow, and is not solidly consistent between users.

On the other hand, if you answer that same question with "strong grain, large print format, cold tone, high contrast, wide angle shot to include gritty surroundings" THEN you are using a palette that is applicable to monochrome photography. The palette is not a strictly technical list of possibilities: it's the graphic building blocks of an image. TO ACHIEVE these graphic features you could use "Tri-X in Rodinal..." or "Delta 3200 in FX-39", but in both cases your image is structured by concepts such as "strong grain, large print format, cold tone, high contrast."

The question of reproducibility is a secondary one. No one can reproduce anyone else's results, but there are graphic primitives that are specific to photo. You will notice that the primitives I have identified from the point of view of the viewer are similar to those I have identified from the point of view of the artist. It is important that they intersect because they are the vehicle of communication of a work's meaning.

My idea of the "palette" is a layer of abstraction just above the actual technical realisation of an image. It's the concepts with which we operate to create an image, and I don't think it has to be a closed list. Art is pretty much an open-ended endeavour, so cataloguing only shows what's been done SO FAR. So I argue that we can define it, even though not in a limitative manner.

 

Just to add to the critique of existing books, I reread Les McLeans's Creative B&W Photo book the other day, and in my opinion he does an excellent job of giving a tour of the graphic primitives of a photo. When he explains how he made a photo, he gives a great insight into what factors he took into consideration. The actual technical details are not what is the most important. If you use his recipes, it won't give you the same results, but we learn from the logic of his picture-making, and his masterly use of the palette. He explains why he chose grain, tone, angle of view, etc, and in that way he shows that photo is not about a silver bullet, but about bending it to your will.