Luminis Imago

The objective of this article is to articulate key concepts of the black and white visual language in different dimensions of photography. The reasons why I’m engaging in these thoughts isn’t theoretical, but rather to better define my own visual poetic and communicate it to my viewers.

The text is accompanied by images from major Italian photographers of the 20th century. Those authors are among those who have influenced most my own way of making and thinking about photography (sources of images and quotes are referenced at the end of this article). The choice of displaying Italian photographers only has no special reason, other than my familiarity with the history of photography in my own country.

The reflections build on the classification into three distinct categories of photographs that I have outlined in my previous article “Photography and Time: sketch of a visual poetic“: photograph as a document of the present time, as a mirror-memory of the past, and as a symbol of the timeless. Reading that article would be a useful complement but is not strictly necessary to the understanding of the present one.

Black and white in documentary photographs

Photographs have an inherent documentary nature, coming from the simple fact that they represent something that actually existed somewhere at some time. This fact holds true irrespective that the depicted reality was catched from real life or created in a studio, observed as a fact of the world or staged as a scenery only to be photographed.

Given their documentary nature, one reason why photographs are made is to record and communicate facts, actions, persons, in a realistic and direct fashion. In performing this function, black and white as a photographic language is often said to be more “realistic” or “true” than color photography. However, quite the opposite, it is a matter of fact that the world— at least as we humans perceive it through our eyes— is full of colors. In fact, to be rigorous, a color photograph is more realistic than in black and white. The reasons why black and white is often associated to “realism” are, on the one side, historical: photographic realism and neo-realism have dominated the scene in an era when the technology of color was still to come or in its infancy; on the other side, and more relevant for our discussion, black and white is a visual rhetoric that puts adherence to the truth over aesthetics and pleasantness. To make a parallel with the written language, black and white is the visual equivalent of an essential and direct writing style, alike a discourse made only of nouns and verbs, void of adjectives and adverbs. In a similar way, black-and-white photographs tell about persons and actions, things and facts, as they are in essence, deprived of accidents and secondary characters. They invite us to remove from the vision, and therefore from the mind, the unessential so as to focus on the essence of what we see. Of this opinion was, among other, the great photographer and critic Paolo Monti, according to whom the advent of color has often led to a “boring verism” and to a proliferation of images where “chromatic information does not add anything to the visual experience”. This is not to say that color photographs are less valuable than those in black and white; it is instead to say that in photography, as in other forms of artistic expressions, redundancies are a noise that ends covering the voice, saying less rather than more.

The following images are taken from Tano D’Amico, a reporter who has documented the working classes’ lives and struggles in Italy from the sixties to the end of the 20th century. What is most emblematic in these images, different from others of the same period, is their absence of any aesthetic of poverty and rebellion; however, the photographer’s closeness to his subjects, his sympathetic eye towards the people, unequivocally emerges from them. D’Amico’s documentary photographs are effective because they are sober but not indifferent, objective but not neutral, in face of the documented reality.

View my documentary photographs in Documents of our Time

Black and white in mirror-memories photographs

Other than documents of the present reality, photographs are records of instants of time that, at the very moment they are caught, immediately belong to the past.

That dimension of photography is at play when photographers aim to express in images their interior world or— to put it in other words— to evoke in the viewer thoughts and feelings from images created according to the photographers’ own sensibility, biography, identity, etc. This kind of photography has been called “mirror” photography to convey the meaning of mirroring in images the photographer’s inner world rather than opening a “window” to the knowledge of the outer world (John Szarkowsky). To that introspective attitude of photography I associate the function of “memory”, not in the historical or objective meanings of the word but in the sense of the individual life experience of Time and Self that everyone builds by connecting past to present and by projecting both to the future in a continuous search for meaning. This is what I mean by photography as a form of memory or, better, as a “mirror-memory” (reference is to “Photography and Time” for a wider exposition of the concept).

If in photographs as documents the absence of colors is meant to focus on the essential of the external world, in mirror-memory photographs colors are removed in order to make room for the viewers to fill the gap with images coming from the inner world. To come back to the analogy with verbal language, it is well known by writers that, in order to activate and keep the reader’s interest, a novel shouldn’t tell every detail of the story and its protagonists; instead, something has to be left somehow unsaid, so that the readers can fill the void with their own mental images, interpretations, meanings. In the same way, a photographer who wants to activate the viewer’s imagination has to eliminate something from the scene so that the observer is called to fill the missing part. This can be done with different strategies, and among them the absence of color is particularly suitable to the purpose, given that, as shown by neuroscience, not only our vision but also our internal images of the world, as stored in memory, are usually in colors. When looking at an image in black and white the viewer is invited to make an additional effort to reinterpret the picture by making recourse to inner memories, images and feelings.

The following photographs are by Ferdinando Scianna, a reporter and fashion photographer who has devoted a significant part of his production to places and customs of his native region, Sicily (my choice is likely influenced by the fact that I myself was born and grew up in the same region). Looking at his rich shades of grays I can’t but figure in my mind the vivid colors of my native places.

These ones by Paolo Monti also are evocative of memories with a conceptual tone that is peculiar to this photographer, who was also a sophisticated photographic critic. The Lion on a gondola as a representation for the history of Venice; the striped wallpaper as a metaphor for imprints of the time; and the portrait of a woman, where the signs of time are everywhere from the surrounding space to the model’s eyes.

View the gallery Memories

Black and white in photographs as symbols

Beside the documentary and the mirror-memory, the third dimension of photography is that of producing and consuming symbols. It has been famously said that humans are symbolic animals (Ernst Cassirer), and indeed since the very beginning the humanity has incessantly produced images with any technical means available, from handprints on the cave walls to the newest smartphone model. We humans create and view images because we incessantly look for meanings that go beyond the immediacy of the visible: symbols are an essential and vital human need. Photography, as a visual art and means of expression, makes no exception.

In this contest, I believe – on the same line of major names in the photographic theory, eg Roberta Valtorta – that black and white is the visual language of the metaphysical and timeless; it makes the visible a symbol, or metaphor, of the invisible. In the way the poetic language tends to abstract from the objective reality in order to transpose things in a world created by the poet, so black and white photography makes abstraction from the materiality of the world to evoke absolute and transcendent meanings.

The following photographs are from Mario Giacomelli, a poliedric artist who used photography as one among various means to express his own personal poetic of land, people and religion. In his photographs, black and white are deprived of intermediate tones and pushed to an extreme, as a dramatic and primitive form of expression.

And finally, the following are by Mimmo Jodice, perhaps the most metaphysical of all photographers and a great source of inspiration for myself. In his photographs, the figures—e.g. those of ancient sculptures— emerge from darkness as from the depths of time, and light is not enlightenment but is rather a kind of revelation from an abyss of unknown.

My black and white photographs in Space for Symbols and Melancholy of the Ancient World

Conclusions

Could it be said that black-and-white photography is an art based on the action of “levare” (to remove), similar to sculpture according to a famous statement by Michelangelo? Perhaps a bit hazardously, this renders the idea that when images are devoid of colors, the observer’s eyes and mind are led to the essence of what is seen, inner images are evoked to complete the vision, the need for abstraction from the visible is called, according to the different uses of the photographic language.

Whatever we do, it is important to bear in mind that making photographs in black and white is not just the act of removing colors: what matters most is the consistency of such visual choice with the other elements of the photographic act, from the choice of the subject to the framing and composition, from the play of shadows and lights to the way post-production is used; and, above all, all these choices must be consistent with the photographer’s intention and design. This is why, in my view, a good black and white photograph has to be mentally conceived before looking into the viewfinder, even better before taking the camera in hand.

And finally, it needs to be underlined that the black and white language isn’t just a visual choice. Its implications in terms of ethics and public discourse in the contemporary era should not be undermined. Black and white is an expressive choice that sets apart from the mainstream aestheticism of commercial photography as well as from the immediacy of mass photography, both making use of colors as their standard language. Quoting the eminent critic Charlotte Cotton, “photographs are an act of making choices. This includes choices regarding methods and style of vision, which need not be defined by the fashionable, marketable production values of an era“.

References

Cassirer, Ernst – An Essay on Man, 1944 (trad it. Saggio sull’uomo, Ed. Armando, 1968). In this summa of his thinking, German philosopher Cassirer exposes the theory of man as animal symbolicum, and of visual arts as a key elements of the symbolic system.

Cotton, Charlotte – The New Color: The Return of Black-and-White, here. An essay by a leading critic of contemporary photography on the return of a of black and white aesthetic in recent times.

D’Amico, Tano – Anima e Memoria, Postcart, s.d. A collection not just of photographs but also of texts and biographical memories by the photographer himself.

Jodice, Mimmo – Passé intérieur, Contrejour, 1993. Édition française avec introduction de Roberta Valtorta.

Monti, Paolo – Scritti e appunti sulla fotografia, a cura di R. Valtorta, Lupetti, 2008.

Morello, Paolo – La fotografia italiana 1945-1975, Contrasto, 2010. From this encyclopedia of Italian photography are taken the photos by Monti and Giacomelli shown in the article.

Scianna, Ferdinando – Istanti di luoghi, Contrasto, 2017.

Szarkowsky, John – Mirrors and Windows, MOMA 1978.

Valtorta, Roberta – Giacomelli: il paesaggio come corpo, in Alessandra Mauro (a cura di), Mario Giacomelli. La figura nera aspetta il bianco, Contrasto, 2009.