Color Photography Has Now Largely
Replaced Black-and-White Photography
Long before Louis Daguerre publicly revealed his da-
guerreotype process in France in 1839, he and another
Frenchman, Joseph Nicephore Niepce, had been experi-
menting with various materials which they hoped could be
used to produce color images. In 1816, Niepce wrote to his
brother Claude:
The experiments I have thus far made lead
me to believe that my process will succeed as far
as the principal effect is concerned, but I must
succeed in fixing the colors; this is what occupies
me at the moment, and it is the most difficult.
While neither Daguerre nor Niepce succeeded in pro-
ducing a workable color process, the desire to make photo-
graphs in color persisted, and it was not long before many
photographers began to hand-color their daguerreotypes.
Often the coloring consisted of nothing more than adding a
little rosy color to the cheeks of people in the portraits;
sometimes rather elaborate work was done in an attempt
to simulate the full range of colors in the original scene.
It is interesting to speculate about what place black-
and-white pictures would have had in the history of pho-
tography if practical color processes had been invented
before black-and-white systems had become widespread.
Assuming equal costs and ease of use of both black-and-
white and color, it is not unlikely that black-and-white pho-
tography would have been considered something of a curi-
osity, perhaps desirable only for certain scientific or artis-
tic applications. The principal achievement of photogra-
phy has always been to record events, people, and scenes;
color is almost always an important part of this reality.
When portrait and wedding photographers made the
virtually total shift from black-and-white to color photogra-
phy during the 10 years from 1965 to 1975, there was very
little realization on their part that in abandoning black-
and-white photography, they were also giving up the long-
term stability of the metallic silver images that they had
come to take almost for granted.
Figure , Beginning in the mid-1960’s, amateur pho- tography in the United States embarked on a major shift toward color negative films and color prints — and away from the previously popular black-and-white films and color slide films. By 1990, approximately 90% of all amateur photographs were made with color negative films and printed on color negative papers.
The ability to make a portrait — to “Take A Moment Out
Of Time . . . And Make It Last Forever,” as a 1980 Kodak
color portrait advertising slogan5 put it — and know that
the photograph could be displayed without worry for many
generations to come was a very important part of the ap-
peal of portrait photography ever since highly stable sil-
ver-gelatin materials (the ordinary black-and-white print)
came into general use around 1900.
Despite their great stability advantages, black-and-white
photographs are missing one crucial element, and that is
color. We see in color; and the general public has shown
an overwhelming preference for color images, whether they
be color photographs, color television, color motion pic-
tures, or color illustrations in newspapers, magazines, books,
and advertisements. At their best, color photographs are
stunningly beautiful in a way that is very different from the
monochromatic images of carefully made black-and-white
photographs. Color photographs offer a much more com-
plete depiction of reality and provide much more visual
information than do black-and-white photographs.
Joel Meyerowitz, a New York City fine art and commer-
cial photographer who started his career in 1962 with black-
and-white films and became an accomplished black-and-
white printmaker, said this about color photography in an
interview with Bruce K. MacDonald in Cape Light, his
celebrated book of color photographs taken on Cape Cod
which also served as the catalogue for a 1978 exhibition of
the same name at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston:
. . . Color film appears to be responsive to the
full spectrum of visible light while black and white
reduces the spectrum to a very narrow wave-
length. This stimulates in the user of each mate-
rial a different set of responses.
. . . Color is always a part of experience. Grass
is green, not gray; flesh is color, not gray. Black
and white is a very cultivated response.
. . . [Color] makes everything more interest-
ing. Color suggests more things to look at, new
subjects for me. Color suggests that light itself
is a subject. . . . Black and white taught me about
a lot of interesting things: life in the streets, crazy
behavior in America, shooting out of a car. Black
and white shows how things look when they’re
stripped of their color. We’ve accepted that that’s
the way things are in a photograph for a long
time because that’s all we could get. That’s changed
now. We have color and it tells us more. There’s
more content! The form for the content is more
complex, more interesting to work with.
from
The Permanence and Care
of Color Photographs: Traditional and Digital Color Prints,
Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures; Henry Wilhelm