The Tradition of “Beautiful by Default
There is an almost dogmatic custom of associating street photography and reportage with black and white. It is often thought that a monochromatic photo is inherently cultured, elegant, and “artistic.” But let’s be honest: if a photograph is empty or technically flawed, black and white will not save it. A bad photo is a bad photo, period with or without color.
Why, then, do we continue to prefer it? The answers are deeper than they seem.
The Utility of Color
Some theories suggest that, at our core, human beings do not think in color. For our ancestors, color was a tool for survival an ancestral signal to distinguish fresh meat from rotten, or ripe fruit from poisonous. It was a practical function linked to preservation, not aesthetics.
In modern photography, color is often managed by the camera’s firmware, which represents a preset made by others: a “pseudo-reality” pre-packaged by algorithms designed by engineers and mathematicians. Other people are deciding for us which tones to give the world. Black and white, on the contrary, frees us from this cage: it is the “free image” by definition.
Black and White as a Book, Color as a Film
The true strength of black and white lies in its ability not to “serve up” reality on a silver platter. It is made of lines, pure shapes, and chiaroscuro that do not distract the mind.
Black and White is like a book: The writer describes an emotion, perhaps even the places and the people, but leaves the reader with the task of visualizing it giving it a face and a color in their own mind. It is a shared game that allows us to process reality autonomously.
Color is like a film: It gives you everything at once, already decided by the director (or the sensor).
The Betrayal of Adaptation: The Tolkien Case
Anyone who read The Lord of the Rings before the films came out knows exactly what I am talking about. The battle of the Ents against the orcs that we had “printed in our minds” was the only true one. The cinematic version, despite being a majestic production, mimics the plot but imposes a different iconography inserting non-existent, incorrect, and grotesque descriptions far removed from the essence we imagined within the pages.
In photography, the same thing happens: black and white respects the viewer’s imagination, leaving room for them to color the photo with their own thoughts. For this reason, paradoxically, a black-and-white photo can feel more “true” and pertinent than one in color: because it does not try to copy reality, it invites us to interpret iinuiamo a preferirlo? Le risposte sono più profonde di quanto sembri.
