Assignment 3: Monochrome

"Today, the victory of colour photography over black and white is almost complete…..To work in black and white now is to make a deliberate aesthetic statement or to reference the work from the past in a particular way"1

Derrick Price

I have a great admiration for black and white photography; I love the way that monochrome can transform an image and focus our attention as viewers on small details or enable us to concentrate on form and tone. Yet, I rarely convert my images to monochrome - approaching this assignment one of the first question I needed to address was my reasons for this.

When I first became interested in digital photography I used photoshop a great deal to manipulate my images. The understanding I gained during this time has proved invaluable in underpinning my knowledge of how the digital image is made up, however, I reached a point when I realised photoshop and digital manipulation was getting in the way of me actually taking photographs. I would spend hours at the screen trying to make something of an image that did not warrant this - I realised my time would be better spent trying to take better photographs and began to concentrate on improving my photographic technique. I stopped using photoshop for every image I took and began only to use it when I wanted to create a specific effect. This also coincided with me becoming 'seriously' interested in photography and a growing appreciation I began to have of art photography - rather than reading 'how to' books and magazines I began to look at photographers work and started to read books on art theory. From this point on I only converted my images to black and white if that was my original intention - I loathe to see alternative pictures shown in both colour and monochrome, to me the photographer should have the conviction to do either one or the other but not both.

To get myself thinking about this assignment I brainstormed what black and photography could mean. Words like real, truth and documentary were the first I thought of along with the term 'fine art photography.' It is a phrase I loathe because of the connotations that photography can only be fine art by conforming to some sort of aesthetic standard. It suggests that the photographer must be serious about their work because it is produced in black and white; I hate pigeon holing and find the description quite insulting as it suggests that photography has to have some sort of sign post that it is art before it can be taken seriously. As my interest in photography grows I become less concerned with work that is purely pictorial and am increasingly attracted to work that is more challenging using unusual points of view or exposure settings. The work of Daido Mariyama comes to mind as an example of this.

I always like to have some sort of theme to underpin my assignments and I kept coming back to the notion of photography and reality as a subject to explore. It seems ironic that black and white images should be seen as more authentic than colour despite the fact they are not a direct translation of the way we see the world. Thinking of photography as truth I remembered two examples from my research which challenge this. The first is an image by documentary photographer Stepan Rudik, Street Fighting Ukraine which won third prize in the World Press Photo awards 2010 and was subsequently disqualified after judges deemed the image did not conform to accepted standards in the industry. (Original image here.) The final image is completely different to the original, the close crop onto the boxers hand being wrapped and gritty black and white treatment give a total different reading to the original image. Interestingly, these were not the reasons given for disqualification - a small area of background detail was cloned out of the image and that was why Rudik had his prize taken away.

Another example of pre digital manipulation of an image is by a photographer many see as a giant in the history of documentary photography W. Eugene Smith. Smith was obsessed with printing and would rework negatives throughout his career for different results. He wrote, "Negatives are the notebooks, the jottings, the false starts, the whims, the poor drafts, and the good draft but never the completed version of the work….Negatives are private, as is my bedroom…"2 In this article by photographer Joerg Coldberg. Two radically different interpretations of the same image, Madness 1959 are shown (called patient in a mental hospital, Haiti, 1959 by Michael Freeman in his book 'The Photographer's vision.') In his blog Coldberg wonders whether this image would have been disqualified by World Press Photo because the figures have been removed from the background in the second image. I wonder whether controversy over manipulating an image in post production either in the wet or digital darkroom is more about elitism than anything else - is it because digital images are seen as 'less' than analogue and photoshop is deemed a simple process in comparison to the skill required by a master printer in the darkroom that criticism abounds? It seems to me that photographers have always manipulated there images to heighten meaning or even change the way an image can be read completely. I do not see this changing any time soon and as long as we remember that any image we view is a subjective rather than objective view of the world I do not see a problem.

For the assignment I decided to take a series of images within a mile radius of my house. My first consideration for this was practical - I had a short space of time to complete the assignment and needed to have a subject that was accessible. I was also driven to explore the notions of photography and truth I have detailed above. I deliberately decided to concentrate on the more run down and unloved aspects of my locality and then to process the images in a way to heighten the subjects grittiness as much as possible. Viewpoint was particularly important in that I deliberately excluded details so the viewer does not have a clear understanding of what they are looking at - I was not interested in showing truth only an aspect of what can be seen in my local area. Where I live in the North-East of England there are high levels of unemployment and poverty, some of this can be clearly demonstrated near to my home but in my opinion is the exception rather than the rule of what the area is like. By choosing to ignore positive representations of the area the set of pictures gives a snapshot of the local area but not necessarily the truth.

I researched different ways of converting the images into black and white (of which they are many) before deciding to only use Adobe Lightroom - I am familiar with the way Lightroom operates and like the intuitive way images can be processed and the way the software encourages experimentation. A lot of advice I read on converting images to black and white advocated trying different treatments to see how an image looks rather than a hard and fast rule or recipe for conversion. This was something I took on board using only my eye as a gauge to whether an image was working or not. My approach was to first convert to black and white and then push contrast and clarity as much as I could to stretch the tonal range as much as possible, with most images I would also lower exposure to increase the gritty feel. I would then tweak the tone curve and black and white colour mix selections before adding a vignette and a small amount of grain. My overall aim was to create a set of images that look like are similar in their treatment and sit together as a group. The most success I had with this assignment however is how I managed to stick to my self imposed deadline for completing shooting, and then work with the images I had taken to produce the set. I had a much improved sense of confidence in my selections and editing choices and was able to pair down my first selects to my final 10 in a much shorter space of time than I usually do. Maybe it was the pull of a very definite deadline for this assignment that helped me or maybe it was my clear approach and increased confidence in my workflow that stopped me slipping into procrastination - I guess only time will tell!