The Best Way to Be a Color Photographer

As I was thinking about what to write about color this morning, a new realization struck me.

It's always tough to write about this subject, because there will always be "internet reductionism" taking place in the background—hysterical shouts in the distance of "Mike hates color! Mike hates color!" Mike doesn't hate color. Mike doesn't love color, is all. But Mike understands that many people do love it. Mark Rothko loved color. And Mike is a grownup and a professional, and (I'll stop with the third person) I've learned over the years to separate my critical judgement from my personal feelings. So I can appreciate work that is very far from my own work and to which I do not have a personal connection. Critical appreciation is not just armchair narcissism. I love Rothko.

The new realization that struck me this morning is that I tend to like the occasional color work of primarily black-and-white photographers (examples: Helen Levitt, Ralph Gibson, Fan Ho), but I tend not to like the occasional black-and-white work of primarily color photographers (examples: William Eggleston [although the linked book is interesting as juvenalia], Ernst Haas). Not sure what that means. I'm going to have to think of more examples before I'll know if this is actually true.

I've said in the past that I think that most people who photograph in color aren't actually color photographers. Color is another layer over the structure, meaning, and luminances of a subject that adds complexity to composition, because the two aspects of the picture—the meaning on the one hand and the color scheme on the other—are uncoupled; there's nothing that predicts that one will work because the other does. Seeing to it that these disparate elements are in some sort of harmony is part of the photographer's job. So should you photograph so that the color works and let the other aspects of the photo fall where they may, or the opposite? If you try to do both at once it's...hard, such that most people simply, well, don't. So what are we supposed to be looking at when we look at a color picture? The color photographers I like are all people who deliberately work with the color scheme of their composition: the photograph is about color in the same way a Rothko painting is. They're sensitive to the color scheme; it's what they're looking at, and it's on that level (at least) that the picture works. I'll trot out my little short list: Eliot Porter, Paul Outerbridge, Marie Cosindas, William Eggleston, Saul Leiter, Harry Gruyaert, Harold Mante, Robert Bergman (I'm loyal to his book even though he's hardly known, just because he's so unapologetically a colorist), Raghubir Singh, Zoe Strauss, Fred Herzog, et alia.

It would be easy to make the claim that a lot of casual hobbyists out there on the wilds of the Internet (I always except present company) who champion color photography don't actually photograph color very well. They simply use cameras that record color, and lazily expect adventitious "found color" to somehow do its work even though they don't work at making it work. But I think the same is true of some famous and respected art photographers, too. I'm not going to name names. The next time you really study a book of color photographs by a respected art photographer, ask yourself whether it really needs to be in color or not, or whether it just is in color. Is the color doing any work at all? Is the color doing anything more than just showing up because that's the way it was in the world? Here's the thing: to me—and I accept that this might just be idiosyncratic—just photographing with a camera that records color is not enough, by itself, to make someone a color photographer. The reductio of this is that you'll often see pictures in color where the color is simply off. It's got a green cast, or it hasn't been exposed so that the yellows saturate, or whatever. On the evidence of the picture it appears the alleged "color photographer" lacks a feel for color.

Raphael, Madonna di San Sisto (1513–14). The original is in Dresden, Germany. I've been fascinated since boyhood by this rather strange painting. Not only because of all the half-hidden faces on the "backdrop." It looks to me like he painted from models (except for the two putti resting on the painting's bottom edge). But who's to say what colors the curtains or the clothing really were? Was that staged, or "replaced" by Raphael as he worked, as in Photoshop?

One more thing and I'll stop, because I know this subject always antagonizes a certain minority of people and I don't want to spoil anybody's morning. There's something new that's been happening more lately. A painter can be a colorist because a painter can do anything from painting a fantasy (Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus) to choosing to paint realistically while changing and replacing colors to suit their taste. If you look at paintings by Raphael or Poussin or Hockney there's no way you can know if the colors represented are records of what was real, or manipulated. But here's the point: for the last couple of decades, many "photographers" have in effect become hybrids of photographer and painter, in that they either elaborately stage their photographs or manipulate them in software after the fact. So they're actually accessing a privilege that was previously reserved for painters: the ability to become deliberate colorists without having to recognize color composition in the moment while shooting. Consider "Radioactive Cats" by Sandy Skoglund or "The Basement" by Gregory Crewdson or "Untitled #572" by Cindy Sherman.

So this is sort of the best of both worlds where color is concerned; you can build your photograph as you please and couple the color scheme back to your intentions for the meaning and structure of the picture in a way that makes sense to you artistically. That, I think, is a lot of fun, whether for viewer or maker, and a cool thing too.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Stan B.: "I always think of Evelyn Hofer first when I think of color photography, the picture of the football players being as 'perfect' a color photo as one, or at least I, can possibly imagine! I think most people, like myself, take photos that have color in it, and just try to make sure that the colors don't distract, and hopefully add a little extra something in the way of detail, information or emotion. Some people like Eggleston or Meyerowitz excel at infusing color seamlessly into more powerful, meaningful compositions, while others use it as an easy cheat—a splash of color here and a matching or contrasting color there for added significance...voila!

"By the way—Winogrand Color recently came out; recommended (Twin Palms)."

Mike replies: I loved "Girl with Bicycle, Dublin" in that article you linked—now there's a color picture.

Is Winogrand Color as good as the 1964 book, which is so unobtainable now? I always coveted that book, although I'll never own it.

Ed Hawco: "In terms of using color, I love the color work of Fred Herzog and Saul Leiter; color is a major part of what makes their work so special.

"In terms of my own work, I’ve always struggled with consistency in color. Back in art school when I was learning to make color prints it was so, so difficult to get good prints that didn’t have a color cast in one direction or another. As a 'native B&W' photographer I found this to be very frustrating.

"This was compounded by the fact that each of my eyes saw color differently, with my right eye having a pronounced warm cast. That was finally fixed in late 2023 when I had cataract surgery with lens replacement. Now both eyes see color the same way, and very vividly. What an adjustment! The world is much cooler toned than I ever knew. (In November my neighbour had a yellow car. In December he had a white car!) This has me worried about all the color prints I’ve made in the past decade but I just can’t bring myself to look too closely."

David Cope: "Saul Leiter turned me on the colour as a compositional element. Love his work. I think of myself as a black-and-white photographer, but when I started to do graphic design as a hobby it really taught me about the language of colour."

Tex Andrews: "Right off the bat you mentioned three of my fave color photographers: Herzog, Outerbridge, and Porter. Each so different! Porter is like the anti-Adams; Outerbridge shows how psychological photographic color can be (as Hitchcock did for cinema); Herzog how color structure works.

"I think you have the essentials of it exactly right: is the color doing anything? For a masterclass in this just check out Jasper Johns' early work (the later stuff is a bit more complicated and personally idiosyncratic) in both color and en grisaille. I've always felt Johns was the Thelonious Monk of post-war painting, both essentialists who had such keen senses of left field such that it becomes central."

John Camp (partial comment): "Few good 'realistic' painters really try to accurately represent what they see, because what they see is usually dissonant. If you look at the colors they use, they are usually at more or less well-trodden points on a color wheel, points which produce certain kinds of harmonies. One well-recognized strategy is a painting that's basically monochromatic, say, variations of blue. And that's why B&W photos are often pleasing—they are automatically harmonious, no matter the subject matter. The more colors in a photo, the more they are likely to be dissonant."

Joseph Kashi: "Josef Albers, a Bauhaus principal who fled Nazi Germany to teach at Yale IIRC, was known for his strong understanding of the interaction of color, both a practical and a theoretical understanding. Many of his books are still available on Amazon and are a great learning resource about how to use color as a colorist, rather than as an 'incidentalist.'"

Mike replies: The first one to have would probably be Interaction of Color, which is, relative to the subject area, an enormous bestseller and a stone classic on the topic.

Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): "I’ll offer brief comparative remarks on Garry Winogrand’s 1964 and the recent Winogrand Color books, both of which I own. The former volume, mysteriously considered a classic, is mostly B&W work with a very few color images sprinkled somewhat incoherently. Honestly, to my eye it doesn’t cohere tightly at all. It’s more like a montage of his work during that rather remarkable year in American history. (He reportedly often carried two cameras, B&W and color, and shot in parallel.) The 2001 printing ain’t terrific, with the B&W image being far too dark and contrasty. The best color image, frankly, is the magical cover image at White Sands National Monument. It’s a simple scene, once seen not forgotten. In contrast, Winogrand Color, recently published by Twin Palms, is exclusively composed of his color work. The printing and paper are excellent, reflecting twenty years of advancements in graphic arts techniques and technologies. As a whole, the book seems no more coherent than 1964…but who expected that? What is presents is exactly what the title suggests; Winogrand’s photos in color. That is, it makes clear that he was not a colorist and did not generally compose his images with color in mind. We get Winograndish B&W in color! That’s not a criticism. Just an inescapable fact."

Richard G (partial comment): "Colour photography in the way you’ve identified it is clearly harder than black and white. I’ve found it so. Many compositions demand the removal of colour to gain strength. Thinking in black and white with film or a sensor dedicated to it frees you up. Ernst Haas’s New York Color 1952–1962 is a marvel for the consistent mastery of so many elements, page after page without a letup. He defied all of the above: somehow his found colours intensified the abstract, and the seeming normality of the colour world made what he found and recorded all the more remarkable."

Comments

[Herman Krieger]

In the use of color, I think of areas, while with black and white, I think of the lines.

[John Krumm]

I figure that I don't do color so well, in the mastery sense. I also don't do black and white well, I don't play my guitar well, and I don't ride my motorcycle well. Most of us, as you know, just go with what we like when it comes to hobbies. We know we have some basic skills others don't, but we also know that's just because we have spent more time behind the lens. I like shooting both color and black and white. No idea if I'm better at one over another. I will say, though, that the three times I've been featured on Flickr Explore, it was all with black and white photos.

I recently turned my phone to grayscale because I read that a study found that people used phones 18% less in grayscale. It's very bland looking, more shades of middle gray than black and white. No idea if it's working, but I kind of miss the color!

[Richard Alton]

Saul Leiter : I love his colour photography, but many of his black and white pictures leave me cold. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's the fact that he isn't fussed about his images being sharp and that his approach works best in colour. Does that resonate with anybody?

[Steve Renwick]

You're not wrong. So many photographs out there are the result of "Veni, vidi, snappti" ("I was there, I saw this, I took the picture"). Those images are mainly about the subject, and the colors in a color photo or the tones in a black-and-white photo are mainly along for the ride. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Robert Capa probably didn't wait around until the light was just right.

That some art photographers can compose with tones (St. Ansel) or that others can really compose with color (especially Saul Leiter, IMHO) is indeed photography at a different level. It's not necessarily better or worse, but it is definitely different.

[Terry Burnes]

Thanks Mike, very helpful. I tend to focus on the composition and take the color as it comes, perhaps tweaking it a bit so that my photo might elicit the same response as the scene before me. But I rarely think about the role of color in the resulting photograph.

I'm also guilty of sometimes converting a failed color photo to black and white as a means of rescuing it (I don't think I'm alone), despite the fact that I probably prefer black and white overall when viewing others' photography. Which sort of reverses the hierarchy in my own work, putting color first and going to black and white as a last resort.

So, two takeaways for me. I need to take some photo walks that are deliberately about black and white, no color allowed. And in my color photography I need to take a moment to think about the role of color in a photo and what to do about it. Perhaps in the long run the result would be a few photos that are actually about color and make good use of it.

[Tom Frost]

What do you think about Shore, Gruyeart, Meyerowitz, and Winogrand's color work? All are conspicuously absent from mention.

[I mentioned Gruyaert. The mentions I made were just examples. --Mike]

[Paul]

Funny you should mention the black-and-white work of primarily color photographers. I really like Martin Parr‘s “The Non-Conformists”. Have you seen it? And his friend John Gossage’s color work is sublime.

[Benjamin Marks]

I always like color photography in which the color is the story. I myself am terrible at this, although I have committed random acts of successful color photography over the years. Saul Leiter's work just sends me, though. And Ernst Hass'. I have tried to copy or emulate their vision(s) from time to time -- unsuccessfully always. But I am so grateful that their work is out there

[Hermon Joyner]

There's a lot of food for thought here. As far as documentation goes, since the world is in color, perhaps the resulting photojournalistic images should be too? That's at least one way to look at it. Though as you point out, frequently color is incidental to the subject in a lot of photography and isn't all that important in itself.

But I found your idea of being a colorist pretty interesting, though. Especially in the last few years, I have found myself manipulating the color in my images. I try to be subtle about it, but I often adjust colors in the Color Mixer panel in Lightroom, making specific colors lighter or darker, raising or lowering the saturation, and even warming or cooling a specific subject's hue. Again my goal isn't to make the image look unrealistic, but to make it match the feeling I had when I saw the scene. Before your writing about being a colorist, I didn't have a word for it. Now I do. Thanks.

[Bruce Bordner]

Not directly related, but I just saw news from CES about a full-spectrum sensor that gives you a perfectly "accurate" color in a cell phone.
Now what do we argue about?
https://spectricity.com/

[Robert Pillow]

I never got the idea that you hate color, just the idea of people spending more money on color image production than necessary. However, as we all have heard over the years, some things are more important than common sense.

Still, it may not be a desire for dopamine that motivates people to shoot film of any kind. Because analogue is self-archival, maybe the film shooter is exercising more common sense than we recognize.

[Albert Smith]

To become a better color photographer, forget the second word, photographer and study the first word, color.

Learn about the color wheel, primary and secondary colors. Colors that compliment other colors, giving a calm effect or colors that contrast and can give conflict or tension.

I've gone out with a specific task to incorporate one of these things and the subjects found themselves while I was looking for the color. Studying this is also why I know I could never own a mono camera. When I set my current camera to B&W, I am frustrated by the colors my eyes see when the display reduces everything to a shade of grey.

[Stan B.]

Yeah, the girl with the bike is my second fave!

I can't directly compare 1964 with the current since I sent the former off to the Bronx Documentary Center. Winogrand Color does have some strong photos (along with the usual filler) in it however, enough to demonstrate that he does have a very knowledgeable command of the medium. I was also amazed to see what he could pull off with the ridiculously low ASA ratings of the period! At $85 though, it's a matter of personal taste, longing and budget.

[J D Ramsey]

I agree with several others that Porter and Leiter are color masters. Eggleston is an acquired taste, but I've come around to appreciate his work ("appreciate" and "like" being on different bands of the scale). I'm a bit surprised that no one mentioned Jay Maisel, who did wonderful black and white work earlier (think the original cover for Mile Davis's Kind of Blue) but most know him for his later color work, much of which is more in-you-face than Porter or Leiter, but fits the urban scene he frequently photographs and shows a sophisticated use of color related to subject. I further like J.P. Caponigro's creative work, which includes some compositing (Uelsmann-influenced), though frequently not. His ability to use color subtely and draw emotional impact is incredibly well done, IMO.

[Tim Walters]

Mike says: "Is the color doing anything more than just showing up because that's the way it was in the world?"

Why isn't that enough? B&W isn't some kind of default from which color is a departure; rather, it's deliberately throwing away information. My goal is usually to take a biopsy of reality, not distance myself from it, so converting to B&W is a last resort. If you see a B&W from me it's probably infrared, where I decided to create a fantasy from the git-go.

[John Camp]

Few good "realistic" painters really try to accurately represent what they see, because what they see is usually dissonant. If you look at the colors they use, they are usually at more or less well-trodden points on a color wheel, points which produce certain kinds of harmonies. One well-recognized strategy is a painting that's basically monochromatic, say, variations of blue. And that's why B&W photos are often pleasing -- they are automatically harmonious, no matter the subject matter.

The more colors in a photo, the more they are likely to be dissonant. On his blog, Kirk Tuck takes lots of photos of downtown Austin, Texas, and very often, the scenes he shoots are notable for a lack of color harmony -- the colors of advertising signs are deliberately bold and often put up without any regard for neighboring colors. This isn't bad, because it's real -- B&W photos are abstractions, which totally miss the impact and meaning of these dissonant signs.

Photoshop and Lightroom were notable innovations in photography because while they (usually) keep the structures of photos, they also allow you to manipulate color like a painter does, removing at least some of the dissonance that can plague color work. One way to do that is to simply mute all the colors, the effect of adding neutral colors to a painting.

As a person who favors B&W, I think it would be interesting for you (Mike) to shoot color photos with your black and white eyes, and then slowly desaturate them to see if there's a point where you like the photo with a *little* color better than you like a straight black and white.

[I actually did that for a while--early on, when I thought that everyone was enthusiastically over-saturating everything. It was only a partial success; the problem for me was that each individual picture worked best with different levels of color, which worked against consistency. I did see a few other photographers use the technique with good success, though, at the time. Bruce Haley uses something like this in his books Home Fires I & II, to excellent effect. --Mike]

[David Drake]

I shot b&w for many years but more recently have been attracted to shoot colour. Not sure why? But perhaps there is more of an initial emotional impact to colour whereas b&w is abstract; more about the idea. But, for me, a colour image works best when it could work as a b&w image. I like to shoot colour as if it is b&w. To still use light and shadow for separation and depth. I love Saul Leiter's work. He uses a lot of black, which creates depth and provides a strong contrast to those stunning Kodachrome colours.

[Marc Gibeault]

Jessica Eaton had a project where she made colour photography using greyscale scenes. https://www.gallery.ca/magazine/your-collection/mixing-light-the-abstract-photography-of-jessica-eaton

[Terry Letton]

Mike I’m commenting here because the last post was closed, I hope you don’t mind me being ‘off topic’. Recombobulated is indeed a word, you used it and we understood what you meant. That is what words do they communicate ideas. This one is just not yet popular enough to receive the blessing of the OED. Though looking at some of the words that have been so blessed recently maybe it should be a point of pride not to be included.

[Allan Ostling]

Let's not forget Ansel Adams, an early user of Kodachrome. He exposed about 3,500 images, some of which were on 8x10 film.

https://a.co/d/hDUR0Ro

[Stan B.]

Helen Levitt said her ideal image would be somewhere between B&W and color, and Bruce Haley swears the color in Home Fires is true to reality...

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Color is a subject at the very core of my interests in, and practice of, photography. It’s a topic on which I could easily (accidentally) expound at length. But, out of consideration for my fellow TOP readers I’ll defer such an excursion. 😉

Instead I’ll offer brief comparative remarks on Garry Winogrand’s "1964" and the recent "Winogrand Color" books, both of which I own. The former volume, mysteriously considered a classic, is mostly b&w work with a very few color images sprinkled somewhat incoherently. Honestly, to my eye it doesn’t cohere tightly at all. It’s more like a montage of his work during that rather remarkable year in American history. (He reportedly often carried two cameras, b&w and color, and shot in parallel.) The 2001 printing ain’t terrific, with the b&w image being far too dark and contrasty. The best color image, frankly, is the magical cover image at White Sands National Monument. It’s a simple scene, once seen not forgotten.

In contrast, "Winogrand Color" recently published by Twin Palms is exclusively composed of his color work. The printing and paper are excellent, reflecting twenty years of advancements in graphic arts techniques and technologies. As a whole, the book seems no more coherent than “1964” … but who expected that? What is presents is exactly what the title suggests; Winogrand’s photos in color. That is, it makes clear that he was NOT a colorist and did not generally compose his images with color in mind. We get Winograndish b&w in color! That’s not a criticism. Just an inescapable fact.

More broadly, it just was not at all common in the 20th century to see many renowned b&w photographers achieve similar color results. Bruce Davidson’s b&w work is sublime but his color work is generally not as arresting. In fairness color photography was a very slow, tough, expensive medium until digital appeared.

Nevertheless, the works of Saul Leiter and Ernst Haas illustrate what could be accomplished in those days when -expression- superseded description with color photography.

But I’m beginning to ramble, exactly what I swore not to do.

[Well, that was worth the price of admission. Thanks. --Mike]

[Gary Nylander]

have enjoyed reading your latest blog posts on color photography. With my photography going back nearly 50 years, I started outing shooting mostly black and white as a teenage hobbyist. When I first started working for a newspaper I was shooting all black and white film until the late 1980s.

During my time off I shot all colours mostly Kodachrome. On the work side of things, I started using all colours for my newspaper work by 1990. About this time I embraced and started seriously shooting all my personal work with black and white film using large format cameras. By 2018 I was out of the newspaper business and I no longer had a "work" side and a "personal" side to my photography it all blended into one.

After leaving the newspaper business I was doing more freelance (ie work) photography but I was also using the same digital camera equipment for my "personal" work. I primarily see myself as a "black-and-white" photographer, but occasionally I come across a scene that captures my interest and I see no black-and-white possibilities, only color so that is what I go with. Sometimes I get two pictures from the same scene that work equally as well in color or black and white, I can't make up my mind.

[Gary Nylander]

I have enjoyed reading your latest blog posts on color photography. With my photography going back nearly 50 years, I started outing shooting mostly black and white as a teenage hobbyist. When I first started working for a newspaper I was shooting all black and white film until the late 1980s.

During my time off I shot all colours mostly Kodachrome. On the work side of things, I started using all colours for my newspaper work by 1990. About this time I embraced and started seriously shooting all my personal work with black and white film using large format cameras. By 2018 I was out of the newspaper business and I no longer had a "work" side and a "personal" side to my photography it all blended into one.

After leaving the newspaper business I was doing more freelance (ie work) photography but I was also using the same digital camera equipment for my "personal" work. I primarily see myself as a "black-and-white" photographer, but occasionally I come across a scene that captures my interest and I see no black-and-white possibilities, only color so that is what I go with. Sometimes I get two pictures from the same scene that work equally as well in color or black and white, I can't make up my mind.

[Dave Millier]

I'm a big fan of Bruce Percy's work. He shoots black and white but in colour eg

https://brucepercy.co.uk/blog/2024/1/11/a-special-place

[Richard G]

For a little while I was pursuing occasionally what I called colored black and whites, images with a deliberate compositional strength, hopefully, and a deliberately limited colour palette that telegraphed: not just another over-serious monochrome try-hard shot, but not some noisy just as found colour confusion either.

Colour photography in the way you’ve identified it is clearly harder than black and white. I’ve found it so. Many compositions demand the removal of colour to gain strength. Thinking in black and white with film or sensor dedicated to it frees you up.

Ernst Haas’s New York Color 1952-1962 is a marvel for the consistent mastery of so many elements, page after page without a let up. He defied all of the above: somehow his found colours intensified the abstract and the seeming normality of the colour world made what he found and recorded all the more remarkable.

[Speed]

The color photographers I like are all people who deliberately work with the color scheme of their composition: the photograph is about color in the same way a Rothko painting is.

As a photographer (not a "color photographer") I make photographs of the world as it exists. The color scheme is one that exists in nature or in the built environment or in the humans that populate the photograph. Mike's examples are staged photographs where the photographer controls the colors on the "set" as I imagine a professional movie director would.

There's nothing wrong with that and this is not criticism -- it's just something I hadn't recognized or even thought of. I guess I'm stuck on composition.

[Luke]

Yeah, I get it, but...

Ask yourself whether it really needs to be in B&W or not, or whether it just is in B&W.

I really like your shot of the boys watching the race, but I wonder what color was there. It probably would have been harder to get the subtlety of the lights and dust in color, but maybe an even better picture.

[Tullio Emanuele]

What about subjects that are shot in color because COLORS are the essence of the subject?
I am thinking about birds, flowers, exotic wildlife.. the list could go on forever. About sunsets, snow capped mountains, rock formations, celestial objects (planets, galaxies, nebulas etc.)??

[Chris Bertram]

I love Gruyaert, Haas and Leiter (I have a framed Gryaert print of nothing very much, some tables and chairs but beautifully observed for form and colour, on my study wall). I'd just add to this discussion that some movie makers have a real feel for colour and I'm thinking especially of Almodovar (look at Parallel Mothers with its reds and greens: gorgeous).

[Dave Levingston]

I could say a lot about this, but I'll stick to just one observation: Black and White photography is an accidental product of the limitations of early photographic processes and, later, of the limitations of printing processes, particularly in newspapers, where I started as a photographer.

If the inventors of photography had been able to perfect a color process that wasn't very difficult, we would not have black and white photography. The inventors wanted to make color photos, but were unable to because it was just too hard with the processes available to them. (And yes, color photography has been with us practically from the beginning...it was just to hard to do.)

[Jim Natale]

Worth noting, I think, is that color master Eliot Porter had a fine B&W book. Eliot Porter's Southwest.

[Craig Beyers]

The photographs we all (well, mostly) consider “good” typically have 1) a clear and strong subject, 2) excellent composition, and 3) enough elements to present or impute a story that resonates. The first and third elements incorporate color; the second, composition, uses both but doesn’t necessarily depend on B&W or color capture (Of course I speak as an amateur photographer, not as a photo editor, critic, or well-established pro). Sometimes color IS the subject: northern lights, rainbows, fireworks, etc. Sometimes it’s part of the theme or the story, such as in fashion shoots, some landscapes, etc. Sometimes it detracts from an image, where the subject is so dominant that the color is unnecessary, as in Cartier-Bresson’s images or the Turnley’s B&W portraits or Paris images (e.g., no one cares—and many don’t know—about the color of the Eiffel Tower in Turnely’s images; it’s the Tower’s shape, the lighting, and the composition that matters, not that it’s an ugly brown). There’s a spectrum between pure monochrome to outrageous or outlandish color; it’s not an either/or situation. Color can be a component of a good photograph, but it isn’t always essential if elements 1 through 3 are strong enough.

Is B&W easier or harder than color photography? In B&W photography, color simply isn’t an element in an image, other than how the sensor records the luminosity; the B&W photographer ignores color in favor of a strong subject and an excellent composition in creating the story. In color photography, color can add or detract from an image, meaning that color is a constraint in making a good color photograph. To me, making a color photograph is harder than making a B&W photograph for that reason. Does that make sense? Mike: please see my portfolio (https://cbeyers.myportfolio.com/work) and consider whether my monochrome photos need color, all of course in support of my contention about the three necessary elements of a good photograph.

[Tim McGowan]

Mike, great post. I really appreciate the education. Glad to see Gregory Crewdson get a mention. For those who are not familiar with his process, check him out on YouTube. You’ll think he’s setting up a scene for a movie.
These is nothing left to Chance in his photographs.

[Mark]

Here’s a story for you. I was involved in a court case involving The Red Rothko. This was probably 10-15 years ago. I’d never heard of him. It was owned by a high society couple in Texas who had loaned it to an art museum there. The husband died unexpectedly and the widow soon discovered they were house rich but cash poor. Not wanting her wealthy friends to know, she requested and received the painting back in order to sell it. She contacted the art dealer from whom they purchased it as he specialized in Rothko. He put out feelers and came up with an oligarch willing to pay 9 or 10 million, I don’t recall exactly which. She insisted he sign a secrecy agreement and agree not to resell it. I don’t recall if there was an outer time limit where that agreement would expire. Obviously she should have put it up for auction but didn’t want anyone to know she was forced to do this. The sale went through, she was paid, the dealer got his cut. Within a short time she learned the buyer put it up for auction and so the cat was out of the bag. It sold for $27 million. She sued both the dealer and purchaser/seller along with the auction house.

To this day it boggles my mind that a big reddish rectangle could be worth anywhere near that. Rothko mixed food in his paint, along with other things. Weird but effective.

[I remember that case. So it cost her ~$17 million for a failed attempt to hush-up her "poverty" relative to her friends. No wonder she was having money troubles! The funny thing is, half of the "Joneses" she was trying to keep up with were probably having private money worries of their own.

You might enjoy a book that came out 15 years ago: "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art."

https://amzn.to/3SjMo3S

--Mike]

[Robert Roaldi]

Found scenes that fulfill your criteria for "colour photography" might be relatively rare. It depends on them existing in the real world and the photographer happening to notice when they have a camera in their hands. Are there more of these scenes than I think? Constructing scenes either in the world or in a studio might have a better shot at attaining this (sorry, no pun intended). I'm pretty sure I've never taken a picture that fulfilled this, not deliberately anyway, as I don't consciously think about it.

Does it make sense to judge a photograph along this axis if the photographer is not interested in it? They may have been trying to accomplish something else.

[JTK]

"Mike replies: I loved "Girl with Bicycle, Dublin" in that article you linked—now there's a color picture."

Just beneath that picture in that article is a link to 'Three Gravediggers Dublin 1966' which is my idea of a PERFECT monochrome picture.

[Moose]

Tex Andrews saith: ""Right off the bat you mentioned three of my fave color photographers: Herzog, Outerbridge, and Porter. Each so different! Porter is like the anti-Adams;"

Ansel Adams wrote: "I am a close personal friend of Eliot Porter. It was I who suggested this book to the Sierra Club. It is a magnificent job — a great message and the revelation of a dedicated spirit."
"Ansel Adams in Color, p148"

[Nils Jorgensen]

Mike, glad to have searched out and discovered some of Fan Ho's color photography, new to me. Love this one: https://www.instagram.com/p/CWnG9jlLJKr/?hl=en

[Moose]

Tex Andrews saith: ""Right off the bat you mentioned three of my fave color photographers: Herzog, Outerbridge, and Porter. Each so different! Porter is like the anti-Adams;"

Ansel Adams wrote: "I am a close personal friend of Eliot Porter. It was I who suggested this book to the Sierra Club. It is a magnificent job — a great message and the revelation of a dedicated spirit."
"Ansel Adams in Color, p148"

[Moose]

We humans always have always seen and thought in color. Assyrian bas-reliefs? Painted in bright color.* Mayan reliefs and statues? Color when new. Greek and Roman sculptures? Painted in bright colors.** Mosaics? Color.

Monochrome is an abstraction.*** Like all abstractions, is can be lovely and/or illuminating. In my view, it is often used where color would be better. Here's an example:

A perfectly nice landscape, Drake's Beach, in Point Reyes NS.

To the eye, did it look like this?

Or was it at sunset, and like this?

Had I used the correct red/orange/yellow filter, monochrome like this?

My latest version:

The truth is, I don’t know what it looked like. Taken 13 years ago, with a camera I haven’t used for almost that long. The time stamp is clearly wrong, probably on EST, or it would be black.
-------------

* Clever and impressive projected color on them at the Bowdoin College Art Gallery.

** Painted copies in the Met.

*** I prefer monochrome to B&W not for local usage, but for accuracy, as many or most prints are tinted, whether intentionally of because the paper is not pure white.

[Sid]

Dan Budnik was a brilliant master of color photography, especially his breathtaking portraits of artists. His work is worth seeing. The Etherton Gallery in Tucson, Arizona had a splendid show of his portraits in 2023. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Budnik)