Why We Like Black and White

After reading this article, I started thinking about what made Shostakovich a film composer of black and white films. His music had a "gray" quality to it, which is an attribute we assigned.

 

"When we hear Shostakovich, we seem to accompany it with semi-conscious visual narratives: it is as if a grainy black-and-white film of the siege of Leningrad itself is playing before our eyes as we listen to the symphony depicting the event (one of his least appealing)."

Color is actually an Illusion. As the light and space artist James Turrell said,   “We give the sky its color”. Over time we gave film its color, but elementally we are perceiving pure light or some “absence” of it. In the luminance and levels of gray are the bookends of completely black and completely white.            
 

We see black and white as being a strictly binary phenomenon, but we also have available to us an infinite amount of grays in between. We see color as being more superior to black and white but having the same luminance levels. What we see as superior is a “richness”, which can exist in either color or black and white, but for some reason, black and white seem richer—or have more pathos.

For those of you who are  familiar with the work of W.G. Sebald, this kind of vibe came to be eponymously known as “Sebaldian”, similar to “Dickensian”. Sebald’s use of black and white photography in his "novels" is the perfect example of the pathos inherent in grayscale and often degraded images. You wouldn't use color photographs, just as the film Austerlitz based on his book of the same title wasn't in color. Sebald is all about black and white. But in real life, Sebald was known to be quite the  opposite in character, which means perhaps we shouldn't take colorlessness as seriously as we do. All media is artifice after all,  which allows you to more easily separate it from real life.

This also has an interesting corollary with sound and music—at least from my perspective as a person who writes music (or what some other people referred to as “composers”): Black and white images tend to evoke a certain vibe or atmosphere—at least initially. I might go directly to a minor key or a darker sound. But it’s not just me—I think it’s something we all intuit subconsciously in the same way that certain foods need specific spicing so as to be complementary. Some things naturally “go” with other things in the culinary world—which transfers over almost perfectly to the visual and sonic arts. Even sound and picture can have “umami”. This is the whole idea behind food porn: everything has to be just-so in order for an “orgasm” to occur. The color has to be orange or yellow, with footage of oranges being squeezed, smacking lip noises, and so on. There’s music in there and we don’t even realize it.    

When I look back on my  “cinematic” work in retrospect, the music that I wrote as a form of film scoring, was in the abstract sense, scoring for black and white films,  perhaps with the "screenplays" based on books or novels that would suggest black and white films. Like the music of Shostakovich, the composer is subconsciously reacting to the world that desires to be depicted in black and white. But black and white is simply a previous state of technology at which time there wasn't a distinction between black and white and color, because color film still hadn't been invented. After it was, we redefined black and white as being sadder. In The Wizard of Oz, this distinction became a creative opportunity for showing the difference between reality and delirium using color versus grayscale--just as we have in recent times in the 2014 film Mommy, where the orientation of portrait and landscape was used as a narrative device.

Grayscale images are still much more abstract than color images, even if the color images are abstract. There is perhaps an arrogance that has gathered around black-and-white images, which is self-evident on social media. As a photographer, I have participated in this and would confess that I have desaturated images for the purpose of wrapping the work specifically for social media. Black and white images are very popular,  exactly for the reasons stated here. But this behavior, I believe, is only in response to the general consensus about black and white images as having something more emotionally deeper than color images--a philosophy that is also expressed in film and music. But when I think of all the films that I've seen that used Kodak stock, with all its color saturation and richness, I sometimes wouldn't want to watch a black-and-white film just for the sake of doing it. I particularly love Almodovar films, which have an addicting eye-candy quality to them. Another more recent film that I liked that was eye candy was Paradise Hills,  even though it was a fairly cliche film in a narrative sense. As deep as I want to be with black and white, color wins sometimes. Even in music, a part of me wants to score dark dramatic music, but I'd sometimes really prefer a pop song. We are all naturally eclectic, but PC seems to win us over sometimes.

Why is it that we think black and white images are better than color images? In my own work, I  usually look at the individual channels in a digital image to see if there is one channel that is more compelling than another, and then I  convert the color image to grayscale. But it is not because I want it to trend on social media. Photoshop has kind of gotten a bad rap as being a tool of manipulation and deceit, but in the beginning, it was essentially a virtual dark room--and I still use it in this way  primarily.

Saturation as a way to show time

Beginning with color and desaturating accordingly is a way to have the best of both worlds between the gray world and the color world, which interestingly introduces the idea of fading over time. In black and white images you can't tell if something has faded or has been desaturated, whereas if you have seen a color image and then later on noticed that it is faded it has shown its age and has gathered another layer of meaning. We want to see things that have actually degraded in some way with our own eyes, but at this point, after we've been using filters on digital images since Photoshop added it as a feature, there is really no way of knowing that time has passed or faded except by looking at the date of the file. (An example of showing chronological  time would be to gradually saturate/destaturate a color film over 90  minutes and 90 years in film time.)

And so this is life in the digital world, where deceit isn't really “deceit”  because we have capitulated to deceit as being an okay thing to do. In the art world, such deceit is sometimes a cunning strategy, because without experiencing something together as a generation, we aren't all seeing the same thing at the same time, with everything a consensual agreement of truth, or sometimes called a "metaphorical truth". It is the passage of time that makes truth more metaphorical or virtual, even within a very short period of an actual event.

Music For Places

Next in the series for Music For Places might be Music For Photographs. I recall an interview with the artist  Ed Ruscha where he was talking about a Walker Evans photo as having an  “audio”. How we appreciate music is like sound in a film: either it is diegetic (in the world of the film, or in the foreground of attention)  or non-diegetic (a soundtrack underlying the action), or playing back in our mind's ear. In the case of the sound-tracked photo, it could be a mixture of both: for the person who remembered the place it is diegetic, for the observer looking at it from the photographer's eye it is a "soundtrack". Ruscha is actually describing a synesthetic phenomenon, such as sounds having flavors, or sounds having a color.  I  have spent some time looking at photographs for this album, and now I  realize all I've been looking at are black and white images, although I  have looked at a lot of the work of William Eggleston, whose claim to fame was color photography, specifically using the dye-sublimation printing process, which makes color photography compelling in the same way that the colorful Almodovar films are, even though the subject matter of Eggleston’s photography could easily fall into the black and white vibe.

The exciting thing about the axis of the colorless to the colorful is the freedom of going one to the other to access all the meaning that has gathered there. Selectively adding color or taking it away is a visual device that will never be meaningless, even if it is a cliche many times. Even if a cliche, it reminds us of a time when it actually had no meaning at all. This applies to any technology that has progressed in a similar way, such that when we go back to the old way it has a new meaning. But before that time, black and white was just the way the world was. So now when  we can create color photographs, it still isn't the real world. And I  see music as being a way to access those feelings inherent in all the old technologies in context with the new. (AI technologies haven't been paradigmatic yet so there's no inflection point to make comparisons).

On Abstraction

I find abstraction the hardest thing to do because it has to be done as spontaneously and genuinely as possible. Sometimes abstraction is not even an available option because craft may take precedence, and in some ways gets in the way of pure abstraction. I find that when I'm playing music with instruments I am not thinking abstractly at all. (You actually can’t because that part of the brain turns off. I find that music performance actually adds "color" to the experience of music, or turns the "gray" of thinking/rumination off). It is only when I enter the world of technology and have to produce something with that technology, is when the abstraction can begin. In many ways the internet as a technology has drawn us into the world of complete illusion and abstraction--and entering into a space where a creative decision has to be made on the technical level (whether it be black and white or color)  we always seem to resort to intuition, in this case, grayscale as being somehow superior, or deeper in emotion, not arising out of technical decisions but rather how to package/market it. This will probably be the consensus as technology progresses. It is now baked in the cake.  High-resolution vs. low resolution is also now baked in the cake, and in the future, perhaps will become the equivalent of anachronistic uses of color versus black and white, and how that extra meaning will inform the music as well. 

[7/12/2025: Even if we generate art and music with AI, there has to be art direction at some point because it involves making choices that fit within a larger framework. If you generate 10 things a day you’ll have accumulated 3650 entities in a year. What does it all mean? Where are the themes? Perhaps this is something AI can do–a Large Art Model (LAM). You can do a lot with an backronym].        

Lastly, I've always felt that rock and roll was really a form of conceptual art, especially as it has been integrated into the film world. I believe it did so through the corollary of film editing as multi-track recording--where a musical performance doesn't take place in real-time, similar to how a film is shot out of order. Many of the sonic experiments in recording studios have their parentage in photography and cinema, which is how we can associate certain pieces of music with film, which we couldn't (or just didn't) before the film had soundtracks.