Bill Pierce
Well-known
We’ve talked a lot about printing in black-and-white and about b&w photography in general. Certainly, pre digital it was easier to set up a black-and-white darkroom to make prints that reflected the way you saw the subject even though firms like Jobs and Kodak made relatively affordable drum style processors that could process color film and prints in a home darkroom. While photographers like Gene Smith and Ansel Adams, photographers that we think of as black-and-white, shot a small amount of color film, there were few photographers who concentrated on color and received that level of critical praise for personal color work. In part that was because most color prints were relatively unstable and did not have a long life. Color was for commerce. (Time, “the colorful newsweekly,” was probably as interested in selling color ad pages as color journalism.) Between the difficulty of do-it-yourself color and the impermanence of most everything short of a the not-so-easy dye transfer print, a lot of photographers chose to stick with black-and-white.
Nonetheless, there were a few outstanding photographers like Ernst Haas, Pete Turner, Joel Meyerowitz, Saul Leiter and Eliot Porter who made the obvious even more obvious. Color pictures can be really good. However, at that time color printing was really a bitch. It isn’t any more. Digital and inkjet changed that. Now we choose between black-and-white and color, not through expediency, but through what works for us in terms of the final image. And, I have to say, sometimes color and the ability to manipulate it will save one of my not very successful photographs from the trash can or the erase key.
Digital has done a lot of things to change photography. Perhaps one of the good things is the ability for all of us to easily choose between color and b&w. Agree? Disagree? Your thoughts on how it effects your work?
Nonetheless, there were a few outstanding photographers like Ernst Haas, Pete Turner, Joel Meyerowitz, Saul Leiter and Eliot Porter who made the obvious even more obvious. Color pictures can be really good. However, at that time color printing was really a bitch. It isn’t any more. Digital and inkjet changed that. Now we choose between black-and-white and color, not through expediency, but through what works for us in terms of the final image. And, I have to say, sometimes color and the ability to manipulate it will save one of my not very successful photographs from the trash can or the erase key.
Digital has done a lot of things to change photography. Perhaps one of the good things is the ability for all of us to easily choose between color and b&w. Agree? Disagree? Your thoughts on how it effects your work?
