Black-and-White
Using achromatic tones from deep black to bright white to emphasize light, form, and contrast.
Black-and-white photography refers to images made without hue, using black, white, and the intervening range of gray values, technically described as grayscale or achromatic tone. Photography began as an effectively monochrome medium because early light-sensitive materials registered the intensity of light more readily than color. Early terms such as heliography, photogenic drawing, calotype, and descriptions of fixing shadows emphasized the action of light and the desire to preserve appearances mechanically. The label black-and-white became more distinct as color photography grew commercially viable, separating achromatic photographic practice from broader monochrome processes such as sepia or cyanotype.
In practice, black-and-white photography depends on tonal range, contrast, texture, and the distribution of light and shadow. Its visual language often includes deep blacks, bright highlights, modulated grays, and chiaroscuro effects that give subjects shape, weight, and atmosphere. Different processes produced different appearances: daguerreotypes offered sharp mirrored detail and pale highlights, calotypes gave softer and grainier paper-based images, wet collodion on glass supported high detail, and gelatin silver printing became a major standard for twentieth-century black-and-white work. The medium has served many approaches, from Pictorialist softness and hand manipulation to the sharp focus of straight photography, the structural emphasis of New Objectivity, and the high-contrast immediacy of reportage and street photography.
Black-and-white overlaps with monochrome but is more specific: monochrome can mean any single-hue image, while black-and-white is achromatic. Its meanings have been debated. It has been associated with seriousness, documentary truth, and artistic abstraction, yet its lack of color can also be understood as a visible departure from factual rendition. In the nineteenth century, the phrase could even criticize harsh prints lacking middle tones. Later uses have attached black-and-white to ideas of classic style, nostalgia, and photographic authority.
Related Projects
- Mario Giacomelli (1925-2000)
Residents and streets of Scanno, Abruzzo, rendered in expressive black-and-white through deliberate motion blur and reworked tonal balance.
- Mario Giacomelli (1925-2000)
Young seminarians at play in Senigallia, rendered through high-contrast black-and-white printing and movement blur.
- Sutapa Biswas (1962)
A return to India after childhood displacement, rendered through travel slides projected onto the artist's nude body and rephotographed.
- W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978)
The day-and-night work of general practitioner Ernest Guy Ceriani, presented as a black-and-white sequence shaped by actual events.
- Minor White (1908-1976)
Rural landscape and spiritual metaphor, arranged as a black-and-white sequence of sharply defined forms and tonal relationships.
- Minor White (1908-1976)
Abstract compositions of frost and domestic details, arranged as a sequence originating in meditation on a Zen koan.
- Jerry N. Uelsmann (1934-2022)
Black-and-white Yosemite photomontages, creating improbable yet visually coherent pictorial spaces through analog darkroom compositing of multiple negatives.
- Édouard Boubat (1923-1999)
Boubat's muse and future wife, portrayed in informal black-and-white photographs.
- Tina Modotti (1896-1942)
Indigenous Tehuana women's daily labor, presented in a 1929 photographic series of close portraits and street scenes.
- Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972)
Identity, family, and mortality in masked pairings of Meatyard's wife with relatives and friends, made during his terminal illness.
- Vivian Maier (1926-2009)
Vivian Maier's recurring self-portrait practice, often realized through reflections and shadows.
- Lisette Model (1901-1983)
Class, leisure, and bodily presence among Nice vacationers and promenaders, presented through tightly bounded black-and-white portraits.
- Lisette Model (1901-1983)
Metropolitan pace and pedestrian anonymity in early-1940s New York, rendered through low-angle, tightly cropped photographs of passersby's legs.
- Aaron Siskind (1903-1991)
Young divers in midair, photographed from beneath the board as high-contrast black-and-white figures against an empty sky.
- Ansel Adams (1902-1984)
The High Sierra from Yosemite to Sequoia, presented through 50 black-and-white landscape photographs.
- Daidō Moriyama (1938)
New York as unstable urban evidence, rendered through magazine-like half-frame pairings, irregular copying, and a variable photographic sequence.
- Vanessa Winship (1960)
Girlhood in Eastern Anatolia, rendered in black-and-white portraits of girls attending state schools near Turkey's borders.
- Elliott Erwitt (1928-2023)
Human–dog companionship and social behavior, documented through carefully timed gestures.