A Theory of Black and White Photography:
Black and White Photography in China
Peter Nesteruk
(China Nationality Art Photography Publishing House,
2015).
Languages:
Chinese & English.
Fully Illustrated.
Publication Date: November, 2015.
黑白照片的理论：黑白摄影在中国
(中国民族摄影艺术出版社，2015).
Contents
Prelude.
Why Black and White Photography? An Introduction
Evoking the Past: What makes a Black and White Photograph a ‘Classic’?
Making Present: Making History (Making Present History). The Documentary Image in Black and White
From ‘Being Timeless’ to the ‘Outside of Time’: Photographing
the Sublime
Dreams and Nightmares: Photography as Ritual Transgression
Another Kind of Dream: Visions, Prophecies and Anxieties
Conclusion: The
Future of Black and White Photography
黑白照片的理论：黑白摄影在中国
内容
引 言
导言：为什么是黑白摄影？
唤起对过去的联想： 是什么使一张黑白照片成为“经典”？
塑造当下： 塑造历史（当下的历史）黑白纪实摄影影像
从“无时间性”到“时间之外”： 拍摄崇高
梦境与梦魇：作为仪式僭越的摄影
另一种梦境：异象、预言与焦虑
尾声：黑白摄影的未来
Prelude
The reason why the magic of
black and white photography persists long after its technological supersession
can be hard to define. Definitive is: that we still find the atmospheres and
moods it evokes compulsive. It enchants and enthralls us and, just when we feel
that its spell is of an altogether delicate cast, it pulls us up short with an
image as earthy as the others were ethereal.
Black and white photography is an art form out on its own.
Unique, with its own particular evolution; yet paralleling -so influencing and
being influenced by- the worlds of fine art and graphics, as of the recording
of events and the documenting of history. It partakes at once of ‘art world’
meanings, as well as those of popular culture and reportage. A
specialism for the connoisseur and archivist which
nonetheless elicits popular affection. Yet despite many attempts to
describe its essential difference from the other genres of the image -not least
of which, its only recently accepted younger sister, colour
photography- the closer we peer at this particular aesthetic phenomenon, the
more its apparent clarity of line disperses and disappears. Like mist
approached, or reflection dissolved as the surface of water is touched, black
and white photography resembles most closely that other phenomenon that
-examined too closely- also becomes ever more evanescent, ever harder to
pin-down. In this respect photography resembles time. Not the time of clocks
and calendars (time outside of us) but the time of our experience; time as we
experience it (from inside). An intimate immediacy which is where we always
seem to be, but which we can never quite pin down. And with a strange habit of
suddenly fading off into a past or a future with which the present, that which
is present to us, shares sometimes uncertain borders; the borderlines of memory
and of expectations. Our sense of the present, we, ourselves, as present to
ourselves as the things we see before us, all in colour
- ‘live’. But what of our memories and our uncertain visions
of the future? Memory, we normally can (and must) differentiate from the
present. It is less vivid, less… present; as past, as what has past, we must
not confuse it with the present. Faded, translucent in
comparison. Lacking in… colour: like a black
and white photograph. Once also a way of recalling the past
(once the only way of recording the past). With its lack of presence (as compared to colour,
the colour of our perception of the present).
Black and white photographs immediately remind us that they were taken in the
past. In this they do not lie. Their presence to us is in part a lack of
presence, a semi-presence. Or a ‘different’ kind of presence.
A ‘half-truth’ that has survived, is all that is left of what once was true.
Summary
The suggestion put forward in this book will be that this
survival, the continuing presence of its charm and its force, is due in part to
the sensitivity of black and white photography as a genre to the suggestion of
meanings associated with time and temporality. Just as in the history of art
many effects of meaning are traceable to the painterly use of time or the
rhetoric of time, indeed to the deliberate and strategic confusion of space
with time, so with the history of photography. The photograph also partakes of
the appropriation of space for the expression of time; a product of our
temporal sense, of our living in time (of having a past, present and future)
and in our sense of being in some manner in debt to something, somewhere,
‘outside of time’ (the rhetoric of eternity or the reference to an absolute
‘outside’). We only need to add the indeterminate, ‘in-between’, world of the
dream to complete the list. The meanings of art are always in some manner a
product of the human experience of time as applied to the realm of the image.
The back and white photograph not only is no exception to this rule, it may
even be especially, even generically, sensitive to the portrayal of the
different modes of human temporal apprehension. Certainly, as we shall see, the
present, past and surreal (or dream) forms of temporality appear to have a
special affinity with the black and white photograph – one key perhaps to its
lasting fame.
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2015