Earlier this year, for reasons I don’t remember, I began thinking about how photographs of birds are now almost always in colour. The alternative to colour, of course, is monochrome, often referred to as black-and-white and I’d been wondering whether black-and-white photographs of birds could still have any impact. Perhaps I’d been irritated by the way a carefully prepared colour photograph can end up looking dreadful, the colours garish and bearing little resemblance to the original photograph even when that’s been processed on a computer with a hardware-calibrated monitor. Facebook is particularly bad for distorting (i.e. ruining) colours, although posting photos in .png format instead of .jpg format seems to avoid the problem (but is there anything that works properly on facebook, the platform so
that it’s now like a parody of itself?). Besides, even the most meticulously prepared colour photograph can’t influence the monitor on which it’s displayed and only a tiny percentage of monitors are regularly calibrated, so what you see on another monitor is mostly a matter of luck.
Last century, controlling colour was much less of a problem because
for many decades the only practical option for most photographers was the
black-and-white print, and even bird photography was mostly a black-and-white
medium. That came with its own problems: notably, how to give the impression of
different colours in a monochrome image. But compared to the problems of
working with actual colours, that problem was easy to deal with, admittedly
because the options for dealing with it were so limited, typically involving the
use of different coloured filters.
[1]Now, however, viewers expect
a photograph of a bird to be in colour. Is it still possible to produce a
black-and-white photograph of a bird that has real impact, I wondered? How
might that be possible? Why would you even bother?
…
Not long afterwards, my tramping mate Robb got in touch.
He’d persuaded Tara to let him put a series of black-and-white prints of the
Ruahine on the wall and wanted to know if I had anything suitable. He liked
the
mystery of black-and-white, he said.
Coincidence
or synchronicity? Whichever it was, his query goaded me into action. He’d
suggested one photograph he thought would work, so I retrieved it from an old
hard drive and worked it up into black-and-white. Not bad, I thought, so I
tried a few others. Not all worked well and some weren’t what Robb had in mind.
But, among those I processed as black-and-white photographs were several of
whio, and I was surprised and pleased that they did seem better than I’d
expected. Perhaps the reason was partly because, despite the English common
name ‘blue duck’, whio are not blue — at least, not a distinct blue — and
getting their colours ‘right’ can be extraordinarily difficult. Removing colour
from the list of things to deal with made the processing more straightforward
and I was able to concentrate on other aspects, like contrast and tonal range,
composition, and subtle selective sharpening or blurring.
However, while they were better than I’d expected they still
seemed to me like straightforward records of the birds, and I was hoping I’d be
able to find some way of saying something other than ‘here’s a whio’. What seemed
missing was an element of that aspect Robb had suggested — a sense of mystery,
that something else was present or was going on, that the story suggested was
more than just ‘here’s a bird’. How might that be achieved, especially when I
don’t even know what it is?
…
Around the time I was thinking about these things I was also
reading a book about killing elephants. The author, Walter D. M. Bell, called
‘Karamojo Bell’ because of his extensive hunting in the Karamoja region of
Uganda in the early twentieth century, is widely regarded as among the greatest
of Africa’s white colonial hunters. The book, Karamojo
Safari, is hard to read, mainly because of his attitudes not just towards
elephants but towards the local people (whom he referred to as ‘the natives’: ‘mostly
savage and primitive peoples’[2]).
Even allowing for the context (the book, published in 1949, recounted Bell’s elephant
hunting safaris at and following the end of the nineteenth century), Bell’s
writing is, let’s say, uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I enjoyed much else about the
book. Yet, constantly, I found myself mourning a time long gone. He’d write
about how he looked out from a kopje or a mountainside at vast numbers of
animals on seemingly endless savannahs, and even Bell himself realised, when he
wrote the book almost half a century later, that those days had vanished.[3] He was undoubtedly stricken by nostalgia; I, however, having never experienced
that time nor place, experienced a keen sense of anemoia. If you don’t already
know, anemoia is ‘nostalgia for a time you never experienced’[4] and a key way it can be triggered is by looking at a black-and-white
photograph.
That resonated, and I realised a black-and-white photograph
didn’t always need a sense of mystery to trigger strong emotions. During one of
my last visits to my sister, she and my younger brother and I sorted through a
great many old prints from the unofficial family archive. More than a few were
of us when we were small children and although they held little mystery — we
knew who the subjects were (us!) and often remembered the circumstances when
our dad had photographed us (it helped that he was a professional photographer
as well as an excellent one) — their rendering as mostly black-and-white prints
conferred a sense of returning to that long gone past: not quite nostalgia
because the emotions they evoked were merely tinged with yearning rather than
saturated with it. I doubt colour prints would have affected me as strongly,
and now I think that might have been because dad’s primary photographic medium
was the black-and-white print.
…
As is the way in this era of surveillance
capitalism, I soon found my Instagram feed being populated by an increasing
number of posts about photographers and photography with a strong predilection for
black-and-white as a medium. For once, I didn’t mind. I discovered a lot that
impressed me (among much that didn’t), and it didn’t take long before I
realised what should have been obvious: that the appeal of black-and-white can
take many forms and isn’t just limited to nostalgia, anemoia, or even a sense
of mystery. Sometimes, for example, what’s appealing can be patterns, textures,
forms, or the tones themselves (I’m struggling to find a way to avoid referring
to ‘shades of grey’).
I’d already known about the marvellous work of Ragnar Axelsson and the book Ravens
by Masahisa Fukase, but the work of Pentti
Sammallahti was new to me, as was that of Gilles
Nicolet and Chieko
Shiraishi. Other black-and-white photography, particularly much of what
Instagram presented from contemporary photographers, I found overprocessed and
melodramatic, as if the photographer (perhaps more accurately, the photo
editor) had been desperately afraid that the viewer might fail to feel the
drama of the moment. The most powerful photographs, I realised, were often
characterised by subtlety: a character harder to achieve than it might appear.
The line between a mediocre photograph and a powerful one was itself subtle,
not easily pinned down.
…
I converted a couple of new photographs to black-and-white and
showed them to a friend. She liked them but she’d already seen the original
colour versions and wanted to know what extra the black-and-white conversions
offered. I shouldn’t have been surprised (and wasn’t — offering both colour and
black-and-white versions and asking ‘which do you prefer?’ is a well-used way to
get social media engagement) but the comment, although well-intentioned, gnawed
at me. All that effort to arrive at the black-and-white image was pointless, it
suggested.
But it’s not. The point of the conversion is not to compare
colour with black-and-white; the conversion is an end in its own right and the crucial
question is not ‘which do you prefer?’ but ‘how well does this work as a black-and-white
photograph?’ or ‘what impact does it have?’ or ‘what does it evoke?’ The comparison
could also be flipped so that instead of asking what extra a black-and-white
version offers over a colour version, one might ask what colour would add that
would improve the photograph.
More specifically, how would the addition of colour
influence the viewer’s perception of the important elements in the photograph? Colour,
I’ll suggest, does not always improve a photograph: it can distract and detract,
drawing attention away from particular elements and changing
the way the image acts on the viewer. To complicate matters even more, colour
preferences change with age
and gender-related
social conditioning, so what you experience when you view a colour photograph
will depend at least in part on your age and gender.
…
I was sitting outside at the back door before dawn on the
coldest day of the year so far, drinking tea, watching flocks
of pigeons flying out from the city, and thinking about these and related
questions. A thought came to me: perhaps, when we look at a black-and-white
photograph in the twenty-first century, in this age when colour is an hegemony,
we subconsciously wonder why the photograph is not in colour and we
assume its main intention is something other than simply documenting a moment. In
other words, when you remove colour from a photograph, you remove much of
the temptation to view the image as a mere representation of its subject. Instantly,
you begin to wonder, and perhaps it’s in that wondering that the sense of
mystery resides.
Notes:
1. Even when colour photography did become common the choice was between colour prints or colour transparencies (‘slides’). Few photographers processed those themselves, so what you got depended on the competence of the lab that did the processing and once you’d pressed the shutter release the process was out of your hands. Now, serious photographers do their own processing: on a computer. Photographing a bird or other subject in colour no longer ends when you hand a roll of film to a lab, and because manipulating colour is now up to the photographer, the process is more complex and the results more variable than working in black-and-white.
2. P. 3 in Bell, W. M. D. (1949). Karamojo safari. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
3. ‘This is a true story of a journey into Karamojo some fifty years ago when it was an unknown [sic] part of Africa. Indeed, even today with the aid of modern transportation, it is but little known. [...] At the time dealt with in this book, the author was the first white man seen by the natives. Needless to say, the conditions prevailing can never occur again.’ (Bell, 1949, p. 15).
4. From The dictionary of obscure sorrows, by John Koenig.
Photos (All are from the Ruahine Forest Park. Be sure to click them to see a better image):
1.Whio pair, Maropea river, December 2023
2. Robb Kloss on the final descent to Sunrise hut from Armstrong Saddle, July 2022
3. Whio pair preening before dawn, Maropea Forks, December 2023
4. Miromiro (North Island tomtit) on the track from Upper Makaroro to Parks Peak hut, February 2024
5. Robb Kloss climbs the track from Maropea Forks to Puketaramea, July 2022
Photos and original text © 2026 Pete McGregor
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