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
- Lola Álvarez Bravo (1903-1993)
Frida Kahlo's artistic identity and personal world, documented through intimate black-and-white portraits made by Lola Álvarez Bravo during their longstanding friendship.
- Sarah Pickering (1972)
Reusable firefighter-training interiors, documented through large-format black-and-white photographs.
- Viktor Kolář (1941)
Ostrava’s industrial transformation and public life, photographed over six decades in predominantly black-and-white images.
- Abelardo Morell (1948)
Exterior scenes within interior spaces, photographed through room-scale camera obscuras.
- John Hilliard (1945)
A camera recording its own exposure settings, presented in seventy black-and-white photographs ranging from overexposure to underexposure.
- Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (1938)
Sunlight moving through medieval chapel interiors across different hours and seasons, recorded in repeated black-and-white photographs in the Spanish Pyrenees.
- Lynne Cohen (1944-2014)
Found interiors shaped by commercial and institutional design, rendered in black and white and populated by traces of human use, synthetic materials, and displaced forms of nature.
- Mariette Pathy Allen (1940)
Crossdressers with their families, friends, and communities, photographed through collaborative portraiture in everyday social settings across the United States.
- Nicholas Nixon (1947)
A sustained record of four sisters aging together, documented through annual black-and-white portraits made over 48 years.
- Roger Ballen (1950)
Psychic fragmentation and the merging of reality and fantasy, presented through photographs of ephemeral glass interventions.
- Emmet Gowin (1941)
The photographer’s wife and her extended family, portrayed through intimate black-and-white portraiture and everyday domestic scenes.
- Larry Fink (1941-2023)
Class relations between Manhattan high society and rural Pennsylvania community life, juxtaposed in black-and-white photographs using handheld off-camera flash.
- Joseph Rodríguez (1951)
New York City life from a working taxi driver’s perspective, documented through car windows and encounters with passengers.
- Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989)
Homosexual sadomasochistic imagery, presented as a 13-print black-and-white gelatin-silver portfolio with predominantly staged scenes.
- Bruce Landon Davidson (1933)
A single East Harlem block and its community, photographed through repeated visits, negotiated access, and collaboration with residents.
- Gordon Parks (1912-2006)
A Harlem teenager’s life within youth gang violence and community conditions, rendered through black-and-white documentary photography.
- Roy DeCarava (1919-2009)
Harlem community and family life in the late 1940s and early 1950s, presented through black-and-white photographs and fictional narration.
- Imogen Cunningham (1883-1976)
Botanical still lifes, presented in monochrome through close framing, light-dark contrast, and a search for clarity, pattern, and form.