Why Monochrome?

In my previous post I declared that I am a monochrome photographer and that I’ve seen the film Fiddler on the Roof (more than once)! But the question I hear you ask, apart from who is Tevye the Milkman, is why do I work in monochrome when we live in a world full of colour?

Well, it all began when I started printing at home at the age of fifteen. If I were a rich man, ya ba dibba dibba dibba… sorry, can’t get Tevye out of my head now! I’ll start again; if I were a teenager today and took up photography, I would inevitably start working in colour as digital makes this so accessible and I’d probably only explore the exciting world of monochrome sometime further down the road.

Milk Churn, Dent Village, Yorkshire Dales.

You see, with digital it is just as easy working in full colour as it is in black and white compared to how it was in the days of film. Setting up a black & white darkroom at home was a lot easier than a colour one. Cost was a factor particularly the expense of a colour enlarger, and also the chemicals, paper and other equipment needed to make colour prints. With a simple black and white darkroom, which I set up with relative ease in my teenage bedroom, there is nothing quite like working in the warm glow of a red safelight and seeing your image appear, as if by magic, in a tray of developer. This is something you can’t do in the complete darkness of a colour darkroom. So that’s how I learnt to be a photographer and a printer, spending hours in the comfort of my red safelight!

I quickly realised that I had complete control over how my images looked. When you take photos with black & white film, that is only the start of the creative process. A negative isn’t the finished photo until you print it. To quote Ansel Adams* “The negative is the score, and the print is the performance”. In other words, you interpret the negative image during the printing process to realise your vision. Choice of paper grade, developer type and techniques such as dodging & burning** were all at my disposal to produce images that I had created myself. Even with a finished print you can keep working on it with various chemical toners to change the tone and contrast.

But why do I continue to work in monochrome today when I could just as easily work in colour? I learnt all about colour photography when I was at college, but it just didn’t grab me in the same way as black and white. My formative years of learning how to create images, spending hours honing the craft of black & white printing, was so enjoyable and educational and I simply fell in love with the whole process! And I’m still absolutely captivated by it today!

Robin Haw, Applebury Hill, Grange-over-Sands.

As a teenager, I fell in love with monochrome photography and at the same time I discovered the great outdoors. I began exploring the landscape in places such as the Lake District and Eryri (known then as Snowdonia). I’m now very lucky to live in Cumbria right on the doorstep of the Lake District and I am surrounded by the dramatic scenery and ever changing light and mood of Morecambe Bay. I love where I live and I love to interpret this beautiful landscape with my photography in my own way. Rather than put the viewer in the scene as it was when I photographed it, I want people to experience the scene through my eyes, through my interpretation.

Now that I use digital cameras and work with colour RAW (digital negative) files, for me it is just like printing negatives. My work is not simply just desaturated colour files converted to monochrome, they have a considerable amount of careful editing, just exactly as I would have done in the darkroom. I really enjoy the editing process and it is just as important as capturing the image in my camera.

As I say, we live in a world full of colour, and digital cameras are superb at capturing it all but, monochrome just allows me more creative and expressive freedom to make images that depict the way I see things, the way I’ve always see them, from the first time I switched on my red safelight!

Cheers for now,
David.

*Ansel Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist who was also an accomplished concert pianist.

**Dodging and burning is a darkroom technique that enables you to make selective areas of an image either lighter or darker.