Reply to Adam Harrison

1. Black and white is an abstraction of the colored world we experience daily. A b&w picture should be b&w for a reason; it should enable us to perceive something that color would only make illegible or obscure.

2. Because photography was almost exclusively black, white, grey and silver for so long, artists working in b&w quickly developed very sophisticated means of conveying information that did not rely on color's presence. Hence the "modernity" we readily perceive in the compositions of artists like Fox Talbot and Atget.

3. Color photography (and by this I mean works made with color film, and not tinted or painted images, like those of Edward Steichen) suffered from early critical and commercial neglect. It is amazing, for example, to learn that Stephen Shore's were the first color photographs to be acquired (as opposed to exhibited) by the Museum of Modern Art, or to read contemporary reviews attacking the images presented in Sally Eauclaire's The New Color Photography (1981).

4. Art should never simply reprise the "look" of the past; this is called "conservatism" (I am thinking of figures like painter Odd Nerdrum, or photographer Michael Kenna). When I claim that b&w is something to work against, I speak as a photographer who admires b&w's capacity for abstract truth-telling, and realizes that these compositional strategies can't simply be mapped onto color. Color must find its own way of condensing information, its -- in Greenberg's words -- "own proper means." This seems to me an extraordinarily open path to pursue. I don't think that this represents any kind of foreclosure or diminishment of creative potential. If anything, the opposite is true: photography is a Janus-faced medium, and we learn by first turning one face toward the light, then the other, and studying the difference in the shadows cast there.
- posted by cjb @ 9:08 PM