Monochromatic

Hamburg, September 2019

Thinking about the "Red Room" in the previous post naturally got me thinking about black and white photography. When I first started taking my photography seriously – somewhere around 1979, I suppose, when I took a deep breath and laid out the cash for a brand-new Olympus OM-1N – practically all reportage and non-commercial photography was done using monochromatic film. Colour was only just beginning to be the new, happening thing in "art" photography: William Eggleston's groundbreaking exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art had been as recent as 1976, and even pioneers like Martin Parr, Jem Southam, and Paul Graham had barely started to make the transition to colour in Britain. As anyone who has tried to use a darkroom to produce colour work will attest, the processing of colour film stock and colour prints are jobs best left to professional labs and, as a consequence, expensive. Monochrome film, on the other hand, is not only relatively cheap but, if need be, you could process the stuff in your hotel bathroom. Crucially, however, it also offers the kind of end-to-end "hands on" opportunities for self-expression that made it a congenial medium for the artist. For the dedicated photographer, preferences in film, paper stock, and darkroom chemistry – not to mention enlargers, lenses, easels, print washers, and all the rest of the darkroom paraphernalia – were matters of intense brand loyalty and finely-calibrated connoisseurship. And, in some cases, jealously-guarded secrecy. From an expressive point-of-view, the chain of choices in materials and technique could yield surprisingly different results from essentially the same basic process.

The 1970s and 80s were the heyday of the magazine Creative Camera and its roster of craft-focussed luminaries like Fay Godwin, John Blakemore, and Raymond Moore, and any aspiring amateur like me looked to them as exemplars of the True Art. If you really knew your stuff, you'd also be aware of the more solid (and, frankly, more distinguished) American and European traditions of art photography, although in those pre-internet days this did require a certain amount of conscious effort. Just to be aware of names like Harry Callahan, John Gossage, Josef Sudek, or Josef Koudelka was to be in a tiny minority; to get to see their actual work, in any form other than smudgy grey magazine reproductions, was remarkably difficult. Exhibitions were rare, and photo-books were still a scarce commodity. I remember encountering the bookshelves on my first Duckspool workshop with a sense of wonder. Peter Goldfield had assembled a collection of the very best, most unobtainable monographs imaginable, many of them inscribed, because so many of those prominent photographers had taught workshops at Duckspool. I could have happily spent my five days there just browsing the books.

These days I have a fairly substantial book collection of my own, including many superb volumes of B&W photography,  but if I want to see exemplary monochrome photographs in the classic style, I usually take down one of several books by Finnish master, Pentti Sammallahti. His compendious collection, Here, Far Away, in particular, always seems to remind me not just how good monochrome can be [1], but also how "straight" photography can, in the right hands, unquestionably be an art medium, in the same way as, say, an ordinary pencil. In that respect it's like another inspirational book, Luigi Ghirri's Kodachrome: both make me want to get out and take more, better photographs. In Sammallahti's case, it also usually sparks a temporary enthusiasm for making monochromatic versions of suitable digital colour images.

"Suitable", because truly worthwhile black and white is not a simple matter of recording what is in front of the camera, although the "truthiness" inherited from film-based reportage of the past does invest monochrome with a certain unique aura of documentary authenticity. In order to create an aesthetically-successful B&W photograph certain latent properties that can easily be overwhelmed by "subject" and "colour" have to be present to the seeing eye – a digital camera or a camera loaded with black-and-white film still shows a full-colour world through the viewfinder – and in particular that elusive quality known as "tonality", something which must subsequently be brought out, whether in the darkroom or on a computer, with proper skill and care. I think of colour photography as being like fresh fruit, and monochrome as rather like the dried, preserved version. A raisin or a prune is its own thing, bearing little resemblance in either appearance or taste to the original grape or plum, and it takes experience, skill, and patience to process one into the other. Only certain varieties of fruit are suitable for preservation by drying, and these are often not the most attractive or tasty varieties when fresh. Whatever the two states have in common, you can't judge one by the virtues of the other, but there's absolutely no reason not to enjoy both.

However, it's not really my forte, black and white. Hence "temporary". Much as I enjoy the work of others, my own efforts rarely give me as much pleasure. I love form, tone, composition, and all the rest of it, but it seems colour is what turns me on. Nonetheless, here, for no better reason than that I felt like doing it, is a little gallery of some of my own relatively recent photographs (all taken with a Fuji X70), rendered in a range of monochrome styles. I like them, and can imagine them printed small – perhaps 6" square or less, in the Sammallahti style – and tastefully presented in plain white window mounts in simple dark-wood frames. But (unsurprisingly, perhaps, given they're a random selection, chosen for experimental purposes) I don't think they show the same unity of vision and approach that (I like to think) my colour photography does. Which is paradoxical; because, if the colour were to be restored, then they probably would.

Laocoön, Royal Academy September 2018

Black Ven, Dorset, June 2019

Tyntesfield, Somerset, August 2019

Dyrham Park, August 2018

Dyrham Park, August 2019

Southampton Golf Course, February 2019

1. It's a real shame that no inexpensive selection of his work remains in print (the cheapest copy of Here, Far Away currently on AbeBooks is £280!). The little Photo Pôche book is OK, and worth getting, but hardly does them justice. If you don't have a copy of Here, Far Away and you ever see one at a price you can afford (in any language – it was published in multiple countries simultaneously – my own copy is German, titled Hier weit entfernt), then seize it with both hands. You won't regret it.