B&W

B&W 's role has changed. Until the 60's you expected photos to be sans color unless the photographer made a special effort. Even TV, if memory serves, was mostly colorless. Then color arrived in carload lots, cheaper and better, till by the end of the 70's B&W was unspeakably antique and dead, dead, dead. It's only in the last few years we've seen a black-and-white revival. A whole generation grew up in color, and many of them find B&W refreshing because it's so schematic, so abstract, so stylized, so...artistic, so...CHIC. I mean, who but somebody with artsy-fartsy pretensions would take the trouble to find black and white film and chemicals on the Internet, nd develop the stuff and scan it and print it, at every step of the way using equipment designed for color, so you have to turn off the defaults. (My Epson 2000P printer's instructions say simply, don't print black and white. I set my B&W images to RGB mode before printing them.)

So universally available color didn't kill B&W after all, any more than photography killed painting - instead the elder technique has acquired real panache. (3/2/2004)