peter nesteruk (home page: contents and index)
The
Aesthetics of Black and White Photography: An Introduction.
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, with its own particular
evolution; unique yet paralleling -so influencing and being influenced by- the
worlds of fine art and graphics, partaking of elite as well as popular art
forms. A specialism for the connoisseur 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 (time outside of us) but the time of our experience; the time we
experience, time as we experience it… With all its contractions and longeurs -
and an intimate immediacy which we can, nevertheless, never quite pin down. And
a strange habit of suddenly fading off into a past or a future with whom it
shares uncertain borders; borders that barely separate our sense of the present
from our memory and our expectations… So close to what we are is time that all
attempts at separation are of necessity artificial – how to approach something
that is irredeemably intimate, already there, in there with us, ‘here’, ‘now’,
‘behind the eyes’? Ourselves, as present to ourselves as the things we see
before us, in colour; but what of our memories, and our visions for the future?
Faded, translucent in comparison. Lacking in colour; like a black and white
photograph. Also a way of recalling the past. With its lack of presence (as
compared to colour, with our perception of the present). Black and white photographs
immediately remind us that they were taken in the past. Their presence to us is
in part a lack or presence, a semi-presence.
Thus
the subtleties of the black and white photograph. What was thought to be out
there on the page, folded tidily into the image before us, turns out to have
been already there, ‘before’ the image in time; in the time we bring to the
image. If the black and white photograph and our sense of time share a
difficulty of definition it is in all likelihood because their proximity to one
another and so to ourselves is dependant and constitutive. The moods of the
black and white photograph appear to be temporal, linked to time in some way,
the same moods as those in which our consciousness swims. Indeed it may well be
that the kinds of time we ourselves experience, through which we order our
experience, may determine the varieties of mood we find in the black and white
photograph.
Most
evocative, most popular of which… the ‘Classic’ – the Classic black and white
photograph; the photo-poster on everybody’s wall; images everybody knows
(Family of Man, Cartier-Bresson). Images which have earned their place in the
history of the popular imagination. The black and white photograph as the
classic form of the photograph; providing its ‘classic’ images. Followed by the
uncanny extreme of the ‘Surreal’ (a genre continuously popular since the 1930s,
from Man Ray and Max Ernst to Kon Mitchiko). Images which defamiliarise reality
or reincorporate into it the logic of the dream (much like ‘magic realism’ in
the recent history of writing). Then there are the almost supernatural
qualities of certain landscapes (Ansell Adams); where it is clear we are
viewing something if not, not of this earth, then pointing elsewhere for its
force of meaning (the ‘Sacred’). More rare (amounting almost to a taboo in
black and white photography) are the images where we experience an eerie sense
of something indefinable but foretold, a quality at once hidden and predictive
as conveyed by the ‘Oracular’ (from constructed sci-fi images of the future to
abstract emptiness that connotes anxiety, our fear of what the future holds).
What
all these moods of the black and white image have in common is their
relationship to a particular form of time; more precisely each mood has an
affinity with a particular form of time as we experience it. Whether to our
sense of a valued survival from the past; something which has matured,
‘arrived’, become definitive of a great photographic image (the ‘Classic’). Or
we may find an encounter with the anxiety attendant upon contemplating our
future (the ‘Oracular’). A relationship with time almost forbidden to the world
of the image. So pushing the lack of full presence or ‘semi-presentness’, which
is the key defining feature of the black and white photograph (as defined
against the ‘full presence’ of colour), into the revealing of the ‘past’ – when
its lack of presence could just as logically be read as indicating the
‘future’. Yet we read it as a form of manifestation of the past; both as an actual relation to a depicted event (the
photograph was taken in the past) and as a rhetorical reading or mood (we read
the images as something that actually happened, as opposed to the surreal dream
image, for example). This reading is then free to slide into the sense of a
‘Classic’.
Or there may be a sublime
sense of timelessness, as if evoking a place outside of time (the ‘Sacred’).
Landscapes become visions of the heavens or the abodes of the gods. We are here
in the presence of the rhetoric of eternity. What is important here is the sense of a
pointer pointing outside of our
everyday world.
And then there is the
uncanny evocation of a dream world where temporal and a-temporal coexist in an
often grotesque but always mesmerizing, if unstable, mix (the ‘Surreal’). All
these moods, listed here above, are
founded on the removal from our immediate presence that is the constitutive
moment of putting into black and white, of the making of a black and white
image framed by a world made ‘in colour’ – a set of moods further
differentiated by their relation to, or ability to suggest, the basic forms of
time through which we live.
Including
one type we have not yet mentioned. A special case that despite being a clear
case of the past in the present (like all recorded events – or even all
recordings, their reference point being their time of making) is nevertheless
felt to be the nearest thing to the sense of the present, to the portrayal of
the present, in black and white photography. A presentation that is the nearest
thing to the real. The making present of a (past) event; the event of which the
record is before us now - with the focus on the fact of the event’s having
happened (or the presence of the past). The documentary black and white
photograph. Partaking of a quality quite apart from the magical transfiguration
of the others discussed in the paragraphs above; apparently earth-bound,
‘gritty’ (yet contributing -over time, with the passing of time- to the genre
of the ‘classic’; so becoming another kind of past in the present). Perhaps the
greatest of illusions created in black and white: the sense of an unvarnished
presentation of reality contained in an image drained of colour, delivered
(long) after the event. Immediacy conveyed by its opposite. Or not quite… for
what we have is authenticity as conveyed by a code. A (historical) habit of
reading the image that we have not yet quite abandoned, even now in the age of
the glossy magazine with its high quality colour images. Augmented by the sense
of black and white precisely as once-removed, as a record, but the most
‘immediate’ (we know we are not ‘live’; that would be the genre of an unsteady
and confusing flow of colour images). Urgency as conveyed by a record (an image
once removed, as we are reminded by its presence in black and white) so not
pretending to an immediacy no recorded or even still image can claim. The
unvarnished nature of black and white as testament to its authenticity; that
is, the ‘authenticity’, ‘truth’, or ‘reality’ of the object or event portrayed.
It is documentary and so ‘present’ because it (honestly) refers to its own
present as taken in the past (our true present, our ‘now’, our self-presence in
time, is an evaporating, moving target…). If the ‘classic’ conveys the sense of
‘the past in the past’ to us in the present then the documentary image is ‘the
past in the present’ (or ‘the present in the past’) as present before us.
So
even in the genre, mood, or voice, of the documentary image, we find a
maintaining of the sense of the ‘once-removed’, lack of full presence, or sense
of semi-presence, that is the essential distinguishing feature, the formal
aspect or means of expression, that supports or is the precondition of all the
codes or moods that define the black and white image and its potential
readings. The proof is the ease with which documentary type photographs become
‘classic’ over time. Their increasing age or ‘pastness’ translating to our
sense of a classic past (a classic from
the past; only survivors can do this; accumulate value over time; the tautology
of the survival of the ‘best’). Aided and abetted by formal aesthetic qualities
that the picture always contained but were not perhaps key to its early life as
a content-based documentary image.
The
relationship of the ‘classic’ to the documentary image is a special feature of
(the history of) black and white photography. These two kinds, together with
their wayward sister, the surreal, constitute the overwhelming majority of
images in the world of black and white photography. The oracular, or
future-pointing form, is rare and too angst-laden for most. Its contest with
the past for the occupation of the semi-present slot in human experience,
occupying a space defined as against the presence of the present, is always
already lost. A contest not for the placing of an event or the making of the
image, but in its reading, the ‘feelings’ we associate with it; thus the event
behind the ‘classic’ feel of an image need not be too distant in the past, it
is, at least in part, a quality we attribute to it. Whilst the ‘sacred’ form,
which points us to the outside of time, has a long history in religious art and
is usually only found in landscape photography or as an option for
interpretation in the background, sky or horizon as part of an image (as in art
history). Religious content normally documents religion and is not of necessity
itself sacred (conveying a sense of ‘elsewhere’).
The moods of black and
white photography may well be reducible to codes of reading established in the
history of the genre; codes which nevertheless bear an uncanny affinity to the
temporal types of our being.
If
we now turn to the categories of the Beautiful and Sublime, often dismissed, but
always returning to the stage of aesthetic discussion (even if often under the
guise of other terminology). These broad categories of sensation are also to be
found in black and white photography: first in the sense of unruly Nature and
other vast matters as beyond our merely human ken – so suggesting something
bigger than ourselves, perhaps threatening to (our sense of) ourselves; and
second in the sense of Nature tamed, and in intimate detail – a pleasure with
no sense of threat. The first is the experience of the Sublime and it is best
if we define it clearly as a confluence of two kinds of meaning-making: the
first sublime-making feature stems from a certain discomfort due to the
apprehension of a threat (whether from the incomprehensible vastness of the
universe to the content of other’s minds); the second sublime-making feature is
as a deictic or pointing as if to an outside, or realm beyond our everyday
-historical- experience. The subtraction of the sense of an ‘outside’, or of a
mixing of inside and outside readily gives us our sense of the uncanny, the
world of popular superstition, the Gothic (not least in modern film) and so
progresses to the sense of the Surreal. The Beautiful, on the other hand, can
be found in the foundational sense of order in the classic black and white
image (its sense of rightness, of not being capable of betterment). Clearly a
given landscape image can veer between both categories and even contain them
both (this is the usual state of play in Eastern cultures and may also be the
case with more Western art than was previously thought…).
The
best readings of the Beautiful and Sublime are anthropological, as forms of
ritual or as functional to our sense of identity. The order of Beauty is to
confirm: the intake of breath that signals the Sublime is to first shake us up
a little and then to reconfirm our identity in a larger mode (as a moment of
insanity heralds sanity’s return). The two moments of the Sublime experience
resemble that of narrative, a problem and then a solution, a moment of chaos
which leads to a new order, an encounter with a Grand Narrative or Big Picture.
In temporal terms, the Beautiful offers order ‘this side’ or in the world
(although the patterns of decorative beauty may often suggest eternity through their
suggestion of ideal form): conversely the Sublime offers a glimpse of eternity,
which ‘though shaking us up a little is part of a moment where we reconfirm
what we are and what we believe (by reference to this ‘outside’ - precisely as
in the functioning of religion). In black and white photography it is certain
landscapes that most clearly carry this force of meaning; whereas the
proportion and composition of the classic image together with the depiction of
the simple and uncluttered ornamental best covey the sense of detached Beauty
which is the special sense of the Beautiful as found in the history of the
black and white image.
Although
many images are clear-cut examples of one or another type of mood, for example,
clearly either ‘classic’ or ‘surreal’, other images consist of (or can be read
as) combinations of two or more of these aesthetic or temporal moods. This
mixed mode is perhaps most typical of those images felt to be both ‘classic’
and ‘sacred’ (as for example in some
Or we may find
sub-categories such as the ‘melancholic’; a special case of the past, which
whilst it may possess ‘classic’ overtones, does nevertheless foreground the
elements of loss or mourning, so heightening the sense of nostalgia which is
generally present in the classic black and white photograph into a darker, more
somber or more sobering experience.
As
in the history of the painted image, there may be a mixing of moods together in
the same photograph. Different parts of the same image may carry differing
temporal values and so differing moods, as when the background is read as
‘sacred’ or pointing to a ‘beyond’ as defined by a given category of religious
tradition). Grounds and frames read as temporal, as indicating past or future to
the centre- or fore-ground’s present constitute the basis of the depiction of
narrative in the image and usually requires the coding of movements as from the
left to right-hand side of the image (in the West) or from the right to
left-hand side of the image (in the traditional painting of the East).
Elements
of this narrative directionality can also be found to remain in black and white
photography, as does another hierarchy based upon left and right-handedness in
the image. The sense of the place of power, ‘Right’, or morality in the
picture, usually in the top left of the image as we look onto it. This sense is
true of both eastern and western cultures, probably due to the influence of the
object point of view as found in the history of sculpture; not only is the
ruler or god incarnate in stone, but his (or occasionally, her) left and right
priorities, that is their
right-handedness, are read as prior to our subject point of view (their right
has the Right to come first). So our top left is or becomes the right hand of
the picture or statue (the point of view of the object). A telling example: in
no culture does one pass around a sacred figure or object from the (our) right;
we pass to the (our) left, the object’s right, and so pass clockwise (this implied
movement trumps the directionality of narrative if there is a conflict between
the two directionalities, as there was in ancient Eastern cultures, where
the(ir) direction of narrative, (our) right to left, had to be reversed to
accommodate the passage of pilgrims around sacred interiors, and so around
statues of deities). (See for example, ‘The Wake of the Annunciation’,
featuring the Museum Ludwig Collection,
Black,
white… and grey. Black and white photography also admits of shades of grey.
Both in tone and in meaning: black and white versus shades of grey; clarity as
opposed to a more somber tone, crispness versus blurring. Blurring/soft focus
may indeed be read as either adding to sense of pastness (a sense of the barely
remembered, or affecting an aura of the half-remembered, or of something
improved by memory, improved by lack of clarity, like the ideal) or the
uncertainty of the future. A preponderance of grey can often be read as
de-classicising; a ‘dirtying’ of the image implying a critique of the present
depicted (now past) or of the trajectory into the future that the image
suggests (industrialization, cultural poverty, pollution etc). Effects from the
darkroom (like those added-in later in digital photography) and the results on
the image of the manner of materials used (texture and type of paper, chemicals
used in print) are all forms of the ‘means of expression’ and include the
incredible clarity of certain large-format camera images as well as the sheer
beauty of charcoal and silver tonalities as found in certain print processes.
If its continued
popularity, as evinced by consumers, collectors and photographers the world
over, bears witness to the survival of black and white photography in the
modern world, then this continuity has also resulted in trends from the art
world at large, the human sciences and recent philosophy offering their
influence, as can be seen in the blurring of documentary (including
‘vernacular’, medical, police) and anthropological forms of record, and in the
conceptual, post-conceptual and post-modern uses of black and white
photography.
Copyright, Peter Nesteruk, 2010