Fine art photographers - black and white

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Fine art photographers - black and white

Postby dinesh.ramarao » Mon Sep 19, 2011 1:48 pm

I have been browsing some 'fine art photographers' websites for a number of days now. Looking at them with varied subjects like nature, pictorials, architecture, ... most of them prefer black and white. Is there any 'reading' required to this?
Photo artists are biased to b/w than color ?
Or is it just that I have stumbled upon them ? :)
best regards,
-RD
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Re: Fine art photographers - black and white

Postby Ganesh H Shankar » Mon Sep 19, 2011 3:48 pm

I think if we want to relate art with rarity then I think black and white is the natural choice of the medium for artistic expressions :) That way medium itself adds to one of the characteristics and helps the photographer and hence it is popular as a medium of choice I guess. Also, I think fine art expressions in color are tough. With "rarity" component going away a color image need to stand solely on artistic visions of the photographer to make it 'rare'. Color often makes it 'copy' which is not what art stands for. With color component missing one dimension goes away
from 'copy' !

I however think the long lasting art is rooted in vision and not in the medium.
Ganesh H. Shankar
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Re: Fine art photographers - black and white

Postby dinesh.ramarao » Tue Sep 20, 2011 8:43 am

Ganesh:
"Color often makes it 'copy' which is not what art stands for" - could not understand your words here. Can you explain a bit more? or did I not understand the obvious ?

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Re: Fine art photographers - black and white

Postby Ganesh H Shankar » Tue Sep 20, 2011 9:00 am

RD, I meant color is what we humans see, that is copy. B&W is not a copy with color dimension of the image going away - well, we can say "less of a copy" :)
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Re: Fine art photographers - black and white

Postby Nilanjan Das » Tue Sep 20, 2011 9:58 am

I remember myself and Ganesh discussing this over a series of emails. To be very frank, even though black and white is my most favorite medium of expression, I have at times thought why does the mind think that converting a good color image to monochrome makes it even beautiful ? Is it just a matter of perception that black and white relates closely to art and hence we feel good ? Probably there is no definite answer to this and also varies from one person to another. Why do I like black and white ? It started like this for me, no matter what , the best conditions for shooting mostly in color are in the morning ( not that they are not best conditions for monochrome ). I initially did not know how to imagine my frames in monotones at the time of shooting. I mostly tried to convert the images later which I liked for photographic reasons but hated them for the colors in them. ( may be due to the fact the image was shot in harsh light, or some very uninteresting shades spoiling my image, dull sky, just imagine all the reasons for which a colored image can go wrong ). I felt I could concentrate more on an image when I started working in monotones. Those were times when I had to make an image and process to see if it also looks good in monotones. But now, in the field I can perhaps imagine the tones and the shades in monotone to an extent while shooting even though am actually seeing in color. But that has happened as I have spent considerable amount of time processing images in black and white images. I have still tried to keep it simple, colors definitely are more complicated to handle as we have no control over what colors we shoot out there. Not that monotones are easy to handle, one has to get used to it, with the tones, the shades, how much he or she wants to bring out, how much we need to hide to express our creations in the right balance. For example you can take the example of the image of the slanting trees posted in the gallery. The red flowers in the colored version expressed much differently than both the monochrome versions, but in the monochromes, the photographer had the option of showing or hiding the tree at the bottom. If am working on monotones then I have the freedom to dodge and burn and hide what am not liking in the frame, or to simplify it. This I think is a great advantage, in a colored image, I think it is impossible to do it. So at times, even though we are working on the same image, the color and the monotone express differently. It is entirely up to the eye to determine which is more artistic. I myself think at times colors express more artistically than monotones and vice versa, so we need to take the call depending on the situation. For many images both monotones and colors look great.
I think what Ganesh probably tried to mention as copy to you RD is that when we are working on a colored image, we tend to remain honest to the tone of the sky or whatever colors we had originally shot in the image. But once converted to monotones, we immediately come out of those compulsions of keeping it as we saw it ( Copy ), and then we have the wonderful world of channels. Working with channels allows our vision to merge with our imaginations and then create a fine art. One might think, ok so monotones are preferable for fine art as more manipulations are possible, one can call it manipulation, but for me, image making begins even before I press the shutter and try to imagine the final result of the frame which I see through the camera. This definitely includes post processing which is a very very important part of photographic fine art creations as every processing strategy revolves around how the mind wishes to express our creations. Black and white photography fine art creation is about presenting an impression of the mind, but no matter how beautiful an image might be in color, we can not do anything to change it even if we wish to. The number of elements we wish to control in our image are thus reduced, thus making it look like a copy and not a creation. I personally feel working with monotones allows me more expanse of imagination and thus it is my preferred choice. My images are fine art or not is for you all to determine, these claims are not for me to make :-). The moment I convert to monotones and come out of the colors it provides me a sense of freedom that am not anymore under compulsion to process my image keeping in mind how to retain all the color data some of which perhaps I did not like at the time of shooting.
Hope I could explain RD, sorry guys, made you read a lot.
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Re: Fine art photographers - black and white

Postby AratiRao » Wed Sep 21, 2011 1:53 pm

Nilanjan, what you say about color trying to remain honest to the tone, to how you actually saw the image, is so true.

maybe i'll repeat a lot of what you have both said here, Nilanjan and Ganesh, but this is a constant struggle inside me and maybe articulating what i feel and why will help me decide in the future :)

every single one of the images i posted here (with the exception of the fowl which i didn't even consider in b/w), i have both versions of. bw has a level of abstraction that relieves me from the burden of truth. in the broadest sense, not literally, you know - i wouldnt misrepresent or anything. it simply allowed me to think about the patterns, the lines, the interaction of the shapes and shadows - the interpretation, the story beyond the obvious - and it became "other than" what i saw. it became my creation in a way - what i wanted to accentuate/hide, not what i wanted to reproduce from nature.

in the most recent one, the moss, i find that the bw version i have is more ambiguous, more mysterious. maybe, i think now, i should have posted that on this forum! oh well.

i have a qn: are there any favorite photographers you guys recommend us newbies to observe? nick is a fav of mine - others?
thanks!
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Re: Fine art photographers - black and white

Postby Rajkumar » Sun Sep 25, 2011 12:44 pm

Hi
I would like to add that B n W allows a wider range of tone interpretation without making the picture look contrived or unreal. In color we are really limited in terms of tonal interpretation since then the color starts interfering look unreal. - Edited to say I think Nilanjan already stated this

On a artistic level I suppose job of art is to strip away the obvious and show the underlying - theme, pattern, story, emotion whatever. Not that this cannot be done in color. But in B n W you have already stripped away one dimension allowing you see the inner layers.
Take for example Raghu Rai's iconic Bhopal Gas tragedy pic - You really do not want to get distracted by the tone of the skin the color of the mud etc etc. That part of the real world is stripped away allowing you to focus on the multiple layers in the image

My 2 cents
Art is about what is inside rather than what is outside
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