Black-and-White Photography

About

For more than a century nearly all photographs were monochrome, because early emulsions recorded light and shade but not hue. What began as a limitation became a language. Without colour, a picture rests on tone, contrast, texture and the fall of light, and the print matters: a silver gelatin print can run from velvety black to paper white, while a platinum print holds long, soft greys.

Julia Margaret Cameron used shallow focus expressively in her close portraits of the 1860s. Edward Weston made a bell pepper look sculptural in Pepper No. 30 (1930), and Ansel Adams systematised exposure and development in the Zone System around 1940. August Sander photographed German society type by type, and Diane Arbus later made square, frontal portraits with a direct gaze. Once colour became standard, black-and-white turned into a conscious decision, taken by photographers from Robert Mapplethorpe to Sebastião Salgado.