When I was young, if you were serious about color you had to shoot Kodachome 25. Even Paul Simon had a song called Kodachrome! Underexpose of about one half stop or so for even more saturated color!!! I was able to get a used Agnecolor laminar flow processor in the late Seventies to make Cibachrome prints directly from color slide film. Funny thing is that when I finally got it all set up, bought all the funky chemicals and the necessary paper, and made a few prints, I realized that I really didn’t like color very much; it sort of reminded me of post cards.
Wow that made life simple, saved me a lot of money and I never looked back! Truth be told, there are those in my view that make very good color photographs – Eliot Porter (“American Places”), Morley Baer (“The Wilder Shore”) and Jeffrey Becom (“Mediterranean Color”) come to mind — but most of what I see just doesn’t do it for me and perhaps you feel that way too. In fact, while I think Baer’s book, “The Wilder Shore” is great and he uses color to good effect, the black and white images displayed nearly side-by-side are just more powerful and meaningful in my judgment.
To me it seems to become all about the color as the end to the means, instead of a focus on the image itself and the sense of reality of the image you are seeing. There is a sense of purity and reality in a black and white photograph that is just different and wonderful at the same time. And when I am making photographs I want to feel like I am a part of the scene, whether the focus is on an event that is happening, a person, form or light. Color is a different reality; it’s how I see and live in the world during all the other non-photographic moments of my life.
One of my favorite movies is Manhattan, and it’s not just because I’m a Woody Allen fan, or because of the plot and the jokes, but also because it is New York in glorious black and white!
Others will obviously disagree with all of this. In their eyes color is the cat’s meow. Or perhaps they carry two camera bodies or film backs, one loaded with color, the other with black and white. I have no problem with any of that and for them they are most certainly right. I say go for it! It’s just that for me and in this little corner of cyberspace I choose focus on the world in black and white … captured on film!