Why Black and White?

Photography already being a distorted 2D representation of multi-dimensional reality, b/w strips off another aspect that could potentially fool us that it is an honest depiction, leaving a tasty gap for imagination and interpretation?

Color is a distraction. It gets in the way of actually sensing the feel the picture has.

When I get "the photographic impulse" -- that urge to record what I see -- I ideally ask myself what it is that draws me to what I see. Is it the color? Or is it the contrast, such a play of geometry? If it is the latter, I choose to photograph in black and white because it removes the factor of color that can distract the eye.

Photography is an abstraction, it reduces the exterior world to a 2-dimension image on paper or screen. Black and white is simply a continuation of that abstraction by reducing the world to grey tones. There are marvellous photographs in monochrome and polychrome, it depends on the subject. B&W will be around decades.

Black and white involves luminance pictures rather than chrominance pictures. Luminance only pictures do not get sent to the brain’s visual lobes for interpretation but instead to the part of the brain that unravels abstractions; a very rich mental experience compared to the mere naming of subject matter.

Maris said:

Black and white involves luminance pictures rather than chrominance pictures. Luminance only pictures do not get sent to the brain’s visual lobes for interpretation but instead to the part of the brain that unravels abstractions; a very rich mental experience compared to the mere naming of subject matter.

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Thanks for this. I've just spent the past half an hour googling about it, and it's a fascinating area of study.

Luminance gives us our "perception of reality" instead of color. This is connected to the same area of the brain that allows some people who are blind from visual cortex brain damage rather than blind from eye damage to walk around without a cane, but also without bumping in to things. They can't "see" stuff, but they can tell it is present.

This was also the centers of perception that Picasso - genius or madman, you decide - exploited with the blue phase. Everything was the same color, like a cyanotype, but different luminance.

This is going to keep me busy for a while.