It’s high time we got off the ‘Monochrome is Art’ bandwagon and learned to use Color.

When I was a kid growing up in London, all I used in my Leica, representing some 95% of my worldly assets, was Tri X. Monochrome film. Easy to buy, easy to process, lots of exposure latitude for my wonky exposure meter and not least of all, very macho. Every street ‘shooter’ (that foul word had not yet been applied to photographers) used Tri X. It was a rite of passage. The quirky fellows with the strange odor used HP3 and HP4. You avoided them.

But none of these was the primary reason I used monochrome. The real reason was that it was cheap and cheap was all I could afford. The idea that you could use color never entered my mind. Economically prohibitive and why would you want color when street work dictated monochrome? Why, could Brassai, Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson and Erwitt all be wrong? Of course not. They were Masters. Gods, beyond criticism. Look to points west and further confirmation that Monochrome was Where It Was At could be readily obtained from its American boosters. Adams, Weston, Cunningham, Callahan, Stieglitz, Steichen, the list goes on and on. And while one or two of these would eventually venture into color, they would forever be known for their black and white work. Their subject matter might be the landscape and the nude, but their vision was monochrome. Goodness help us. A monochrome woman….

Then a couple of strange things happened. A great British photographer named Anthony Armstrong-Jones popularized the idea of very grainy pictures, in black and white, of course, whether in his fashion magazine work or in social commentary pieces. Another great British photographer named Sarah Moon, who wisely chose to make Paris her home, followed up on the idea when GAF/Ansco introduced its wildly grainy GAF 500 color slide film. Suddenly, in this world of Seurat redux, pointillism was back and all wrinkles and imperfections disappeared into a gentle haze of colored dots. But there was a photographer far more important than either of these, as regards the history of color, and that photographer was Eliot Porter.

Porter was a devotee of color almost from the beginning, most famously garnering Ansel Adams’s scorn for his adherence to this new medium. Porter, not a voluble man, famously said “I believe that when photographers reject the significance of color, they are denying one of our most precious attributes – color vision.” Porter may not have changed our view of landscape photography, but his vision of the beauty and infinite complexity of nature changed the way we see. If we care to see.

Let’s just make a seismic shift, for a moment, to the mathematical work of Benoit Mandelbrot. Quoting from his paper presented to the Society for Chaos theory in Psychology and the Life Sciences, presented at Berkeley in June, 1996:

“Fractals, as all present know, are irregular geometric objects that yield detail at all scales. Unlike Euclidean, differentiable, objects that smooth out when zoomed into, fractals continue to reveal features as more closely regarded. Fractals also have “self-similarity” which, in one meaning refers to the presence of parts that resemble the whole, or to the continual repetition of a feature. Benoit Mandelbrot not only invented the term fractal, but advanced the position that fractal geometry is the geometry of nature. Eliot Porter, the nature photographer, upon reading of Mandelbrot’s work, realized he had been taking pictures of fractals in nature for decades. To promote the point, he produced a collection of photographs for a book titled Nature’s Chaos “

I do not doubt that there is no more important body of work, when it comes to our fundamental appreciation of nature and of color photography, than that of Eliot Porter. Porter made color respectable for the art photographer. It is that simple.

OK, back to the simpler world of situation comedy, beer advertisements and SUVs.

Now it’s time to ‘fess up.

Take one of your color pictures, you know, one of those not good enough to boast about, but not bad enough to throw away. A decent but not a great picture. You know the one. We all have many to choose from. They are the bane of us photographers. Too good to lose, too bad to print, the result being that we keep the disk drive manufacturers, the album makers, the storage sleeve specialists in business for no good reason other than, were we brutally honest, we would simply throw these mediocrities away.

OK, so you are a sane modernist. You may not have gone the whole digital hog, but you are smart enough not to waste time in a darkroom, preferring the civilizing light of nature. You prefer, in other words, Porter’s world. You scan those mediocre negatives and ruminate over them in Photoshop. Now that insanely complex application happens to have a ‘Desaturate’ option in one of its many tediously detailed menus. Don’t fight it. It’s under Image->Adjustments->Desaturate. Click. Yes, Siree Bob!, you have made monochrome from color. Gold from dross. Art from a snap.

C’mon. Admit it. You have done it. Or you have thought about doing it. Because Monochrome is for artistic simpletons. Two dimensional thinkers too constrained in their cages, too bound by convention, too attuned to mediocrity, to think that anything other than black and white, B&W, monochrome, sepia, platinum toning, etc., etc., can be Art.

I think back over five hundred years of painting. From Ucello and Giorgione, via Raphael and Velasquez, through the Impressionist and the Fauves, to the modern day. Not one, not a one of them painted in monochrome. Why? Because there was no cost difference and because patrons regarded monochrome as the province of the poor. The dictate of the sketch. The conté crayon drawing. The pencil rendition. The idea for a painting.

So stop fooling yourself. You can no longer justify it, as I did, on grounds of cost. The very fact that you are reading this on your computer places you in the top 1% of the world’s income bracket. You can afford color. But your excuse is simple. I Am An Artist, you say. What you mean is that you are not good enough for color. Because you cannot handle it. It’s just one variable too many as you avoid making the effort.

Color is hard.

But, as Porter reminds us, color vision is one of our most precious attributes.