There’s a good chance you have asked yourself this before: should I photograph in black-and-white? It sounds like a question about taste. It is not.
Try this on one of your favourite photographs. Maybe a portrait, or a street scene, whatever is sitting in the camera and convert it to black-and-white.
Don’t think about it. Just look then switch it back to colour and look again.
Something moves. Not the image. The image itself hasn’t changed at all. But your perception of the image has shifted.
Take the portrait, you see here. They have two different feels right? The portrait made on the most recent Loop photo walk in the Belgrave arcade. It is of a new photographer to join our walks named Pear.
In a colour photograph things will pop. A bright orange grabs your attention. A blue jacket brings your eyes in closer.
In black-and-white, however, you tend to look at something else entirely. You go straight for the subject, or the shape, or the soul; the reason the photograph was made in the first place.
Colour is rarely neutral. It reaches into our memory.
A particular blue is never just a blue. It’s a sky you remember. A shirt someone wore. A mood you felt and tied it to a memory.
Advertising it has understood this for decades. A red logo isn’t chosen by accident.
Black-and-white removes that shortcut.
Without colour to lean on, our attention has nowhere else to go but the subject itself; the moment it was made. Not your history, your own personal experience; the photographs’ present tense.
So when should you photograph in black-and-white?
It’s not about which one is better. That’s a losing battle.
The better question is what do you want someone to experience when they look at your photograph?
If you want them remembering something of their own? Shoot colour. Evoke that emotion.
But if you want them standing inside your moment, undistracted?
That’s a black-and-white photograph doing its job.
Most photographers choose based on what looks good, or because they don’t know why the colour version didn’t work.
Few photographers choose based on what they want to happen inside the viewer.
Next time you’re not sure, don’t decide by eye. Decide by asking what you want someone to feel when they actually look.