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
- Gerry Orkin (1955)
Community self-representation, made through participant-triggered single-exposure photographs in a canvas booth.
- Michael Kenna (1953)
Japanese landscapes and spiritual sites, rendered in black-and-white analogue photography through long exposures and wet-darkroom printing.
- Meryl Meisler (1951)
American street life and nightlife across changing communities, documented through candid black-and-white photographs from the 1970s to 2023.
- Elizabeth Waterman (1985)
Strip club dancers and working lives, documented through 35mm film and long-term immersion across United States nightlife venues.
- Stephen Dupont (1967)
Gang identity amid urban poverty and cultural disruption, documented through black-and-white Polaroid portraits of Kips Kaboni members in Port Moresby.
- Stephen Dupont (1967)
Ordinary Afghans asking to be photographed in wartime Kabul, documented through rapid Polaroid portraits amid street crowds.
- Nikolai Vassilev (1945)
Heavy industrial labor in late-socialist Bulgaria, documented through black-and-white photographs of work, rest, and environment at the Kremikovtsi metallurgical plant near Sofia in 1988.
- Xiangjie Peng (1961)
Performers with dwarfism in China’s Dwarf Empire theme park, documented through direct environmental portraits.
- Ryan Weideman (1941)
New York City taxi passengers after dark, documented through black-and-white flash portraits.
- Cindy Sherman (1954)
Female identity shaped by mass-media stereotypes, documented through staged black-and-white self-portraits.
- Xiangjie Peng (1961)
Itinerant circus communities at the edges of the mainstream, documented through unvarnished black-and-white photography, from public spectacle to private endurance across provincial China.
- David Attie (1920-1982)
Participatory portraiture under Cold War cultural exchange, documented through black-and-white Polaroid studio portraits with subject-controlled cable releases and mirrors.
- Derek Bishton (1948),
- Brian Homer (1945),
- John Reardon (1948-2018)
Multicultural self-representation in Birmingham, documented through participant-triggered portraits with cable releases against a white backdrop on the street.
- Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)
Abstract cloud photographs as metaphorical inner states, rendered with small black-and-white gelatin silver contact prints across Lake George from 1922 to 1934.
- Ramón Masats (1931-2024)
Public festivity and social ritual at San Fermín, documented through insider street-level black-and-white reportage.
- Xavier Miserachs (1937-1998)
Urban transformation and the collective pulse of 1960s street life, documented through high-contrast black-and-white images across Barcelona’s evolving neighbourhoods.
- Christopher Churchill (1977)
Faith as a need for connection in post-9/11 America, documented through 8x10 black-and-white photographs of people and places, across every U.S. state.
- Yordan Yordanov (1940-2009)
Everyday rural life in mountainous 1990s Albania, documented through unstaged black-and-white photographs.