We’ve all seen old black and white photographs, whether they are wedding photos of our grandparents, stills from great battles from over a century ago, or of great presidents and royalty from by gone years. With all our technological advancements, we still see monochromatic photography today. There must be some reason that we forgo color for certain moments we choose to capture. Black and White photography seems to call back to another era; it has a timelessness about it. By making our photographs like those of yester year, we hope to make our moments have the gravity and significance of those events, and often times, that juxtaposition between then, and now has a timelessness all it’s own.

Complex feeling

In today’s modern sense, taking the color from a photo seems simple enough; but the truth of the matter is, it’s so much more complex. One could make a case for black and white as being an evocation of our past, asking to give us the same sense of grandeur that it has. Black and White photography takes a moment, and makes it a part of history, our own personal record of our lives. As a personal account; there’s an old dusty photograph that sits in my family home, somewhere between childhood and graduation, a black and white photograph of my uncle. He’s much older now, with a wife and child, a steady job, car payments and a mortgage. But in that photograph, he’s seventeen, care free, and alive with youth, doing some areal maneuver on his well-worn skateboard. That moment feels classic now, like it was made to be captured, and looked at for the rest of history.

There’s an emotional element to black and white photography that color cannot capture. Happiness, joy, and love can all be displayed easily because the subject is the focus and not the variations of color. It’s a simple kind of beauty that will stand the test of time.