Shades of Grey

Southampton Old Cemetery

I was never much good at black and white film photography in my darkroom days. Most people weren't. What you generally used to see were dull grey renderings of a colourful world that lacked either a true black or a true white, and had little or no graphical impact. These were also usually pictures made of, rather than from something, to use a distinction I like to make. That is, if you're curious what a particular High Street looked like in 1936, a photograph of it is perfect, the more documentary the better. Colour would be even more useful, but unavailable at the time. If OTOH you were looking for an expressive, wall-worthy artwork then both you and the photographer will have been working to a different set of expectations, and the fact that it was made in (from / out of) that particular High Street is probably irrelevant. Most photographers were, and to a large extent still are documentarists. It is, after all, photography's USP.

The darkroom was never my happy place, but I tried to make the best of it, the only alternative being to pay someone else to make even worse prints from my negatives. Obviously, some people are B&W film darkroom wizards. I watched Thomas Joshua Cooper give a printing demonstration on a Duckspool workshop I attended in 1991, and it was a revelation. Although only in the sense that watching some maestro demonstrate their pianistic accomplishment up close would be a revelation: as I determined many posts ago, playing the piano is impossible. The photographs of, say, Finnish photo-maestro Pentti Sammallahti or Emmet Gowin are similarly revelatory. Who wouldn't want to be able to do that? Sadly, it seems I can't.

Somewhere in the 1990s I realised that colour was more my thing, but then discovered that the colour darkroom was an even more hellish experience, essentially a mechanical process using vile chemistry and with little of the scope for hands-on creative intervention typical of monochrome printing (a.k.a. "dodging and burning"). Yes, you could twiddle some colour balance dials on the enlarger, but this was generally guaranteed to make things worse. So I did finally embrace the alternative, which was to pay someone else to make satisfactory prints from my negatives. This was convenient, but very hard on my bank balance.

Then – hooray! – digital cameras, image-processing software, and excellent colour inkjet printers for home use arrived, and everything changed. I was free to indulge my preference for making colour prints, and cook an evening meal for two small children at the same time. Three cheers! In fact, you didn't even need to make a print to see and to share what you'd done: photos look terrific on a computer screen. So, when the Web arrived, a lot of photo-enthusiasts abandoned prints altogether (a mistake, in my view), and simply posted their work online.

However... I still admire the well-crafted B&W print, and image-processing software has put this within reach of anyone similarly inclined. You can simply feed your colour image in at one end, make some tweaks and choices, and out comes a perfectly decent monochrome image. Print it on some paper with a surface resembling a wet darkroom paper, and you'd have to be truly expert to tell that what you are looking at is essentially a fake, or rather (in one of my favourite ugly words), a skeuomorph: an object that copies the defining features of a similar object made from a different, more prestigious material, even though these features are not intrinsic to or serve any function in the skeuomorphic object. For example, the pores and wrinkles on imitation leather, the fake stitching on shoes with a glued-on plastic sole, or indeed the weight and carefully-textured surface of a "baryta" inkjet paper.

"Tintype" shopping bag (made on my phone)

Is this a bad thing? I don't think so, unless deliberate deception is intended. It may seem a bit daft to mimic the "look" and imperfections of wet-plate photography, say, or of a Polaroid snap by using some slick app or plug-in, but where's the harm? The fetishisation of "authenticity" when it comes to different media is one of the more reactionary features of the art world: if you've read my two posts on the exclusion of photography and digital art from open exhibitions (Original Print and Original Print 2), you'll know my views on this. In a nutshell: new technologies for image reproduction (e.g. woodcut, engraving, or lithography in their day) become respectable media for artistic "print making" only when they have become obsolete in the commercial world. Ditto all those toxic, messy, and labour-intensive photographic techniques of the past like wet-plate, tintype, and the rest; see Sally Mann or Joni Sternbach. Lovely pictures, but, crikey, the faff involved...

Monochrome images have also benefitted from this retro-fitted respectability. Once, there was only wet-chemistry B&W photography. When colour film arrived, alongside cheap full-colour printing, it was dismissed as vulgar stuff, only suitable for commercial work, and monochrome was promoted to an art medium. It is doubtless true that colour, badly handled, can be tasteless and a distraction, and that if you drain the colour out of a photograph your attention is re-focussed on wholesomely arty aspects of a picture like shape, tone, and composition. Oddly, though, no-one has ever said this about paintings. "Grisaille" is a pretty niche technique.

But: in our digital world, is it daft or dishonest to take an image file, in colour by default [1], and pass it through software that will render it as a monochrome photograph, in a range of B&W "looks", from faded album snap to selenium-toned exhibition print? Any more or less than it is to turn it into a skeuomorphic "tintype" with those characteristic plate and processing imperfections ladled all over it? I don't think so, not if what you want is a picture made from something, rather than a documentary rendering of something. After all, journalists must tell the truth, or something very like it, but fiction writers can just make stuff up. Spoiler alert: there is no such person as Sherlock Holmes, and never was. Sorry! And as for poets, well:

In old-fashioned novels, we often have the situation of a man or a woman who realizes only at the end of the book, and usually when it is too late, who it was he or she had loved for many years without knowing it. So a great many haiku tell us something that we have seen but not seen. They do not give us a satori, an enlightenment; they show us that we have had an enlightenment, had it often, – and not recognized it."

R.H. Blyth, Haiku, vol. 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press, 1952)

Southampton Old Cemetery

("And did those feet in ancient time...")

1. Unless, of course, you buy a super-expensive monochrome-only camera or have your camera's sensor doctored to only produce monochrome files. Both of which strike me as pointless and extravagant, but each to their own...