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June 8, 2011
An interesting point is made in this discussion between Michael Bühler-Rose and Matthew Gamber at Bombsite about black and white photography today.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, sauwastika?, Adelaide, 2010
I shoot a little bit of black and white but I do so without thinking much about it. Mostly I think when I'm looking at my digital archive, oh that would suit black and white, and I have a bit of play around.
Bühler-Rose is more reflective. He says that today we have:
an art world where large format and color photography is the norm. Now, if it isn’t in color, people assume it must be for some special effect, like you are trying to overemphasize that your photograph is fine art, or that you are trying to be a purist. However, if it is a special effect, then how can it be pure or essential? It’s an embellishment. If something is in black and white there must be a reason for it....Can you remember walking into a gallery and not seeing a huge C-print? Ten years ago, it was a novelty; twenty years ago it was a spectacle, and a rarity. Now, it is just the default.
Gamber agrees that this has become a normal thing to see and that people would say things like 30×40 is the new 8×10. He adds:
They had a point, in the sense that if you didn’t print at such a huge size, you weren’t taken seriously – you weren’t a professional. If you were still making contact prints in graduate school, you were living in the past and without a peer – because you were seen as anachronistic. Black and white seems to be forever locked into the look of mid-20th century, arguably the height of its use by both professionals and general consumers, at least in the industrialized world.
They both agree that black and white photography needs to be reinvented in that this mode of photography seems to be in a similar situation to painting having to re-establish its identity after photography.
Black and white photography is an obsolete media and users have the ability to revisit it with fresh ideas that were not really worked out before.This would focus on new uses, or rather, focus on how to recycle some old uses in new ways.
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