Since I restarted photography after long hiatus, I decided to concentrate on monochrome. For some reason, it came naturally to me to not produce colourful images anymore.
That’s a big change for me because I’m a landscape (amateur) photographer and I spent most of my photography life taking images that were very colourful and fairly saturated, rarely going out outside the hours before and during the golden hour.
Suddenly, I couldn’t see the point of these images. They seemed frivolous and lacked gravitas. It felt like colour images were trying to lie to me by hiding the important stuff behind a layer of overwhelming colours. I was drawn to take monochrome images and to converting my existing photos to monochrome.
I think part of the reason is that monochrome forces the inclusion of context. There is no distraction of a nice, pleasing, stylish, colourful scene that would be the be all and end all of the photograph. It’s all contrast, textures, and gritty. You can’t sustain interest in a monochrome image with just the esthetic aspect. You have to work at it harder, think more, plan more, question more. Somehow, that attracted me to monochrome and it gave meaning to that style.
Also, to keep interest in a monochrome image, you need it to explain itself. It needs to tell a story to the viewer. It doesn’t have to be a story in time that somehow would explain where the scene came from and where it’s going. It can be context. From the various elements in the image, the reason for these elements to exist needs to emerge.
To me, it’s the difference between syntax and semantics: syntax is colour; semantics is monochrome. Syntax makes it easy to understand things: it explains and clarifies the function of each word in the sentence. With Syntax you understand where you are in the sentence even if you don’t understand the words. Semantics convey the meaning. To me languages are moving more and more to the semantic side by dropping a lot of syntax: some modern languages rely much more on semantics to work than older ones (think English vs Latin). I’m not a language specialist, but I imagine that moving to more semantics-based languages uses more brain power. Digression over.
My parents disapprove when they look at my photos. They ask why I don’t take colour images. that monochrome is old and pointless. They grew up at the junction between monochrome and colour (for the public) and they very much see monochrome as something their parents were doing, and colour as their photography.
I guess, as the next generation, I see both my parents’ and my grandparents’ generations’ photos and I can choose what I feel I need to do without the pressure of the new and the rejection of the old.
It might be a phase for me. Time will tell.
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