The mystery of black-and-white

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 enshittified 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.

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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