Black & White and Color

True Photo Journal n.11, 2025

‘Black & White & Color’

by David Campany for True Photo Journal n. 11

Black-and-white and/or color? It’s a perennial question. Forty-five years ago, the cultural critic Roland Barthes wrote of color as “a coating applied later on to the original truth of the black-and-white photograph […] an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses).” That’s a vivid and strange idea, and to a large degree it was generational. Born in 1915, Barthes would have seen color arrive and replace black-and-white on the cinema screen, in the illustrated magazines, family snapshots, and television. Even so, he was onto something quite profound. On your smartphone, if you switch a color photo to black-and-white you do sense a kind of coating being removed. Switch it back to color and, for a second at least, it will feel like over-painting, an excess being applied.

That notion of truth being black-and-white might also be generational. Color came first to the advertising and fashion cultures of distraction and fantasy. Documentary and photojournalism embraced it much later. Clearly, the world is not black-and-white, and a color photograph is richer in information and more realistic. But if black-and-white is thought of as beneath a color coating, it is understandable how this might play into the idea of truth underlying what is superficial.

In the analogue days, one had to choose black-and-white or color film. Some photographers worked with two cameras, shooting both. On my desk as I write, I have a copy of Life magazine from 1958 with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s mix of color and black-and-white pictures of China, and a Sunday Times Magazine from 1968 with Don McCullin’s equally mixed work from the Vietnam war. In the digital era, choosing between the two could not be simpler, technically at least, but it is noticeable how few contemporary photographers actively combine black-and-white and color.

Anastasia Samoylova is known for her sunny palettes that are a fairly accurate rendition of the sunny geographies she prefers to look at (tropical Florida and the American south). She has photographed more drab worlds – New York, Paris, London, Moscow – but she tends to include advertising billboards or store fronts within her frames, importing the full-spectrum dazzle of consumerism. Nevertheless, her main bodies of work, notably FloodZone, Floridas, Image Cities and the forthcoming Atlantic Coast all contain small but important numbers of black-and-white images. Sometimes they set the scene (the aerial views in FloodZone, her study of life at the forefront of climate change). Sometimes, they evoke classic documentary photography. Sometimes, they riff on the work of photographers in the modern canon Samoylova so admires (Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Berenice Abbott). But always the black-and-white amid the color unsettles, keeping us thinking about what color and its absence can mean and do.

Over a number of years, I came to know Samoylova’s work well through editing her books. From time to time I would suggest an image might be more effective in black-and-white, for itself and amid the color, as a kind of jolt or counterpoint. Initially this came as a surprise to her: editors do not usually suggest such a dramatic transformation of the work. But black-and-white soon became an important part of Samoylova’s fast-evolving practice. Last year I edited Adaptation, an overview of her work to date. At one point in the process, I assembled of folder of all her black-and-white pictures, and began to think of them as a body of work in their own right. Yes, there is certainly more restraint here than in her work overall, although that’s bound to come with draining out the luxuriant pinks, blues and greens. There is also a less contingent sense of time. Some of these photos and subjects look as if they could be decades old. Or shot yesterday. What you see here comes from that folder I put together, although I include one color picture to keep us on our toes, and within the fold of Samoylova’s way mixing things up.

I doubt there is much we can say in general about what happens when we glance between black-and-white and color. We have to think about it case-by-case, which is how we experience it. Nevertheless, I think an awareness of this phenomenon is always there in people’s minds to some extent. After all, in daily life we do still encounter black-and-white and color, even if they are uncommon in the same body of work.

Meanwhile, I notice a lot of contemporary movies are switching between the two, perhaps to distinguish dream or memory from waking life; or one place from another; or one character’s perspective from another’s. It feels contemporary but it has a long history. In The Wizard of Oz 1939, do you remember the transition from the black-and-white of Dorothy’s Kansas farmstead to the Technicolor of the yellow brick road? The farmstead interior was painted in shades of grey. Dorothy wore a black-and-white dress and black-and-white-make up. When she opens the door the colorful land of Oz really overwhelms. This was the very first color movie that millions of people saw. In A Matter of Life and Death 1946, the transition from monochrome heaven to colorful earth happens in a close up of a rose, blooming from clay-grey to bright pink on the lapel of a descending angel. “We are starved of Technicolor up there,” he sighs knowingly as he touches down in a moonlit summer forest. Is black-and-white a kind of starving? Of what? Color? Pleasure? The full life? Perhaps it is, but there’s a place for that, and you feel it when the color comes.