Black and white

Black and white

I don’t want to make too much of this – but I definitely don’t want to make too little of it.

I view myself, photographically, as a bit of a monochrome specialist – black and white, as I called it first, and still do when I want to avoid being too up myself. Photographically, it’s a very pure art, stripping reality back to its bones, concentrating on the essentials.



Of course, there are associations with black and white, as there are with the colours – purple for royalty, red for passion, white for purity, black for obscurity. But these are cultural artefacts, and not fixed and final. In some cultures, white is the colour of death… So the significance isn’t a black and white issue. So to speak.

Making images teaches us an important lesson about the two extreme tones (people have been known to argue that they are not colours, but the absence of any colour), and that is that to appreciate either, one needs both. What we see in a monochrome pictures is defined by the beautiful combinations of black and white, and all the tones in between.



One of my photographic heroes, John Blakemore, has experimented with subtly nuanced images that are drawn in very limited tone palettes, white and light grey, black and dark grey. But most images live through a rich mix of the two, and everything in between.

The year has seen polarisation around the slogan ‘Black Lives Matter’ – and argument that to say that this suggests that white lives don’t, which is to miss the point. Western societies behave as though white lives matter, but often treats black skin as something lesser. As photographers, we know that to remove either from our images diminishes the pictures. We need to apply this lesson to our societies.



Locally, there was a great fuss a few years back about a statue of Princess Diana with black skin: there is relatively little said about the unrealistic blonde and blue-eyed Jesus seen in many images. Or the blonde Mary in Ely cathedral, below. Palestinian Jews in the first century were just a touch swarthy and dark-haired…

So let’s follow the example set by Bex and Jamilla in the pictures. We’re better together: at Christmas, and always.