I have recently been thinking about my fascination about black and white photographs. Sometimes when I look at a photograph I have a feeling it would have been better if it had been in black and white rather than colour and then I can almost hear my dad’s voice saying that photographs in colour look so much more beautiful than in black and white.

Old family photographs

I was wondering if this love for black and white might have been influenced by the fact that I am a 1960’s child and that the first photographs of us as children were in black and white. My mum had a photographer come to our house and then we had photo sessions as a family. I can remember these photo sessions, the photographer and how we got dressed for the occasion. Also when I look at the photographs now, I can remember these little moments and the whole atmosphere around this family photoshoot.

Apart from these photographs of us as children, I also have photographs of my dad and his family from before and during WWII in Dresden, Germany. There is a sort of simplicity for me about these old photographs. It’s almost as if you can read the facial expressions clearly and there are no distractions. I also wonder if we do not somehow loose something in our photography today with all the technological advances and the strive for technical perfection. Maybe we are loosing the soul of the photo, the character of the people we photograph.

You don’t have to know my grandparents in this photo to see that my Opie loved my Omi very much and he clearly made her very happy. I love this photograph and what it’s telling me. I wish I could have been the photographer capturing this photograph and I wonder if he, as he developed the film in his dark room and saw the photograph, also realised that there is something magical about this picture.

Mysterious

Maybe it’s also the little mysteriousness that I like about the black and whites. Almost as if you would like to have been there to know the story. I love when my parents would look at these photographs and try and remember where it was and what they were up to and allowing us in a time and era we don’t know.

Contrast

The fact that we can see shadow and light more clearly in black and white photos, means that you can focus on things better. For me contrast is something very interesting, whether in food tastes, colour, texture or shape. In this case, it’s the black of the shadow and the white of light. This leads us to focus on specific parts of the photograph and the focus will be different for each viewer.

Classical

Black and white photos have a very classic feel. It is the simplicity of it that makes it timeless. It’s almost as if the background, the fashion, the hairstyles become less important and the focus is so much more on the person. Maybe it’s also the association with days gone by, a previous era. Even now when I take a photograph in black and white it has a sudden distant effect, as if I transported it back to a previous time.

Romantic black and white

Winter makes for great black and whites. It reflects the mood so well. A quietness, accentuated of course the wonderful bareness of the trees. On a cloudy day you find that the sky is a great simple backdrop and the way people move are so much different than in the summer and spring. There is a kind of closeness between couples in the winter, that I find magical. It then that I want it to be in black and white because it reminds me of the old black and white films, the romantic films with the happy endings.

May Black and white photographs be loved forever after.