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
- Rahim Fortune (1994)
Black American self-image and community life, observed through black-and-white photography across Texas and the American South.
- Aleksey Myakishev (1971)
Rural everyday life, nature, and Orthodox faith in the Kolodozero community, documented through long-term observational black-and-white analogue photography.
- Wendy Ewald (1951)
Children’s perspectives on themselves and their communities, presented through participatory photography in Wendy Ewald’s Kentucky school workshops.
- Ignacio Acosta (1976)
Copper’s commodity chain between Chilean extraction and British trade and consumption, investigated through analogue large- and medium-format photography.
- W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978),
- Aileen Mioko Smith (1950)
Methyl-mercury poisoning and resistance in Minamata, documented through a collaborative, advocacy-oriented black-and-white photo-essay.
- Giancarlo Ceraudo (1969)
The Argentine dictatorship’s death flights and enforced disappearances, investigated through long-term documentary photography.
- Libuše Jarcovjáková (1952)
Queer sociability at Prague’s T-Club under state socialism, documented through black-and-white flash photography.
- Ponch Hawkes (1946)
Mothers and daughters, rendered in gelatin-silver domestic portraits made in family homes.
- Dorothea Lange (1895-1965)
Rural displacement and agricultural labor in the 1930s United States.
- John Divola (1949)
The meeting of moving dog and car, rendered in grainy black-and-white photographs made from Divola’s moving vehicle in the Southern California desert.
- Anders Petersen (1944)
A late-night social world at a Hamburg port-district bar, rendered through intimate black-and-white photography.
- John Divola (1949)
A self-portrait series on aging and mortality, made by setting a ten-second self-timer and running away from a tripod-mounted camera.
- Annie Hsiao-Ching Wang (1972)
A mother–son relationship, recorded through recursive black-and-white photographs placing previous family portraits within each new image.
- Miroslav Tichý (1926-2011)
Women in Kyjov, seen through blurred, uneven exposures produced with improvised cameras and extended by pencil additions and handmade mounts.
- Irving Penn (1917-2009)
Portraits of prominent public figures, made in a shallow angled studio enclosure with controlled high, angled lighting.
- Grete Stern (1904-1999)
An editorial series of reader-submitted dreams, presented as photomontages.
- Gabriele Basilico (1944-2013)
Chair–body contact and temporary imprint, rendered through staged studio photography with Polaroid negative film and raking light.