B&W intellectual, color emotional?

[Richard G]

I disagree with the premise. Colour introduces another dimension which can make the production of a coherent image more difficult, but when it succeeds there is more content and it could be said to be more 'inetellectual'. Have a look at Paul Neuthaler's picture of a farm in the recent 'Painterly' thread on the Leica forum on photo.net. His image calls up notions of halcyon days in a world more perfect. Responders invoke Wyeth. Perhaps the image would have worked in black and white, but the lovely muted colours add to the overall effect. Even Rothko's monochrome is usually red. This is not mere emotion. And emotion is often not just mere emotion but has its own content which is not 'unintellectual.' I suspect the emperor is wearing black and white.

 

[Mael]

Well, we like to think like puting ideas in pre-defined labelled boxes. This is this. That is that. This goes there...It is reassuring for ourselves. To "think" we have an answer on a debate that will be written on the 198th volume of the superficial encyclopedia.

Eventually we could take our time for this nice W.E. to go out taking pictures (both B/W and color).

I am happy that some people can earn money publishing thoughts they are only interested in themselves like this Bill Smith.

BTW : I too can make emotionnal B/W pictures by shooting poor hungry people, just before my wife says : Honey ! Time for dinner !😀

 

[MartinL]

Eventually we could take our time for this nice W.E. to go out taking pictures (both B/W and color).I am happy that some people can earn money publishing thoughts they are only interested in themselves like this Bill Smith.

A number of ironies with this post. First, someone who is reading this thread says that we (and he, I presume) would be better off not reading, but out taking pictures. It's a tired put-down, a cliche.

Then, commenting on a thread and article that have generated many thoughtful responses, he observes that nobody is interested.:bang:

Humans categorize. It's the way we make sense of the world. Examined very closely most of our categories have porous margins and discussions (color-BW; intellectual-emotional; film-digi; SLR-RF) are useful to expose and refine the categories.

 

[Daneinbalto]

Chris101 wrote

As an evolutionary advantage, the ability to distinguish one's prey - and preditors! - from the background based on color, is certainly an advantage. That is precisely why deuteranopic vision, such as ours, has thrived. A significantly large portion of human males have 'green diminished color blindness' - something like 4 to 5 percent. This makes it so that camouflage stands out against foliage like black on white. And back when humans were subject to the forces of evolution*, it was the males who did the hunting. The ability to spot prey at a greater distance was an advantage and colorblind men were important to the hunt. Thus we have survived with this superpower intact!

I'd like to understand the camouflage/deuteranopic vision connection better.

I see an analogy to something I once read about making duck decoys. I heard that it is very difficult for humans if not impossible to color match the decoys. Even if green acrylic paint and duck feathers have the same exact color to humans they are unlikely to look identical to the duck. This is due to differences in the location of the sensitivity peaks for the R, G, B, receptors and the possible existence of a fourth receptor in the eye of the duck. Where trichromatic humans have a 3-dimensional color space (that can be mathematically reduced to 2 dimensions), tetrachromatic animals have an additional dimension that makes it impossible to map into the human color space.

So I can understand that something that is camouflaged in a trichromatic color space will not remain camouflaged in a tetrachromatic color space. However, I cannot understand that going the opposite way (from trichromatic toward dichromatic) would take away from camouflage. Not that I have tried the experiment, but if I turn down the saturation in my photoshop, I don't think it will uncamouflage camouflaged objects. Should I try messing with only the green channel?

Or maybe the real reason that some deuteranopic humans can see objects that humans have tried to camouflage is not due to their blunted signal in "one of the channels" but due to one of their absorption peaks being slightly shifted from other humans. I'm not so sure this would work as well on camouflaged animals, however. Animals are camouflaged to avoid detection by not only humans but a variety of animals and many non-primate predators have dichromatic vision.

Please help me understand.

 

[David R Munson]

There are at least as many theories about these things as there are thinking photographers, of course, but for a long time I have liked Nobuyoshi Araki's comments that for him color work is linked to Eros and B&W to Thanatos. That is, there is death in monochrome and life in color, and that he finds himself continually exploring the extremes and the space between the two. He has expounded beautifully on the themes of life, death, self, and sex in his work, and I found the correlation with color and monochrome to be fascinating.

 

[rondo]

Not sure how intellect and emotion can be separated - that aside I am surprised nobody brought up the issue of abstraction which I associate more with B&W. Could that be achieved with color? probably not as easily.

 

[David R Munson]

I suppose that would depend on your method of abstraction. If based on color...