Black and White Photography

In spite of the rapid advancements in photography, it sometimes seems as though real photographs, made by real photographers, are black and white. Perhaps this opinion is generational and held only by those to whom, for all practical purposes, all photographs were black and white. Perhaps this is learned subconsciously while studying the classic works of the masters of photography. Even so, there appears to be a resurgence of interest in film based black and white photography – to the point that “fine art” and “black and white” photographs seem inextricably linked.

The photographs here were taken over the past thirty or so years using a variety of manual and semi-automatic 35mm and 120 roll film cameras. All images shown are film based and I personally processed most of the film. I also made traditional darkroom prints from many of the negatives. Of course, the images you are seeing are a result of scanning those negatives and editing digitally. I’ve made inkjet prints from those digital files and – just speaking of my own, personal, skills – the digital prints are much, much better than the darkroom prints.

My current practice is to use film when the desired result is a black and white photograph. The negatives are scanned, processed in Photoshop and printed digitally on an inkjet printer. I sometimes use a digital camera and convert the (color) digital capture to black and white. When edited properly, it is difficult to tell the digital black and white from the traditional film based photograph – kind of sad.