 For so many people, they think that black and white photographs are simply an absence of colour, that the world of the black and white is just dull monochromatic shades of grey, that it lacks any of the vim and the vigour that you might see from a wonderful photograph in strong and rich primary colours. Today we're going to be looking at black and white photography and discovering that it is actually an extremely colourful way of seeing the world. How's it? When you think about great black and white photographers, so often people will drag up names from the past and with the exception of say people like Ansel Adams who did a lot to develop and nurture and grow the art of black and white photography, a lot of the names that are suggested are simply names from back in the days when black and white was really the only option in which to photograph. So I thought it'd be involved for better to look at more modern exponents of black and white photographers. The people who do have the option to express themselves in colour but choose to embrace the medium of black and white, to go into that monochromatic world and to tease out all of the potential in those wonderful tones, in those rich lighting, the texture, all these things quite often get swamped by the domination of those strong primary colours who are always kind of elbowing themselves to the front. You're no doubt familiar with the piece of advice that says when you remove colour from a photograph, then emotions are able to surface from easily, certainly subtle emotions. And this becomes quite prevalent with two photographers, one of whom I was quite familiar with is Alexi Tyrenko and another guy called Zhu Hanshun, and I do apologise if my pronunciation of some of these names is a bit off, but they have two wonderful approaches to using exposure to their benefit, certainly with Alexi's photography. There is this crowd, this faceless crowd, this blur of people and occasional just the one hand just frozen in time and I find they're very powerful. But at the same time, I find them very cold, I find them very distant and alien and maybe that's because of the nature where these photographs were taken during the collapse of the Soviet era. But then you contrast these with Zhu Hanshun's photographs of Hong Kong, which feel, although they have on the surface a similar sort of feel to them, are far more about the layers of story, but far more about the infinite number of people who have passed by that spot and how each one of them has left their mark on the places they are at. So there are far more discernible faces, there are far more personal touches within Zhu's photographs, with the Lexis, there tends to be a far more dispassionate feel, maybe dispassion is not the right word, but a certain far more withdrawn, I think withdrawn is a good example. There's a funny thing that I have that sometimes I can taste a photograph. I don't know if you understand, if you've experienced that, where you sort of taste a colour. Well, I kind of occasionally taste black and white photographs and Vincent Peter's photographs absolutely do this. They have a wonderful tonality to them that is in some ways quite reminiscent of images from the 1920s, 1930s, George Hurl sort of studio glamour shots of film stars. And I just, when I look at these images that there's something about the tonality of these photographs that really appeals to me. And I think also it's because, you know, the way that they're lit has added to this kind of this very organic, very warm inviting feel to the images that you look at them and they are at once familiar because obviously these are faces for whom most of us are familiar with. And yet they feel like they come from a different time and a different place, but not because, unlike, say, Sally Mann's wet plate photos which we'll look at in a minute, because they are photographs on technology that is archaic, for want of a better word, but because they are evocative of a time. And once again, when I look at Vincent Peter's colour photography of the same people of the same time, in the same setting, with the same lighting, they don't have the same quality to them. They lack any sort of emotional connection, I feel, that they get when they're in this black and white world that is exceptionally intriguing. And I can't quite put my finger on it, and that sounds like a weird thing to say in a channel where we talk about photography, but sometimes it's just, it is really just the vibe. And if we can't understand the vibe, that's actually perfectly fine. We're not required to overanalyse everything. But there is, when you look at these photographs, just look at them and feel that you could almost, you could almost like, you know, run your hand over it and everything would just be smooth and almost like, kind of slightly rubbery. So when you let your hands bounce back together, it's just, I love this aspect of black and white photography. And that's why I feel that when you start connecting to this, once you start opening up yourself to seeing the worlds of black and white, just beyond these tones of grey and shades of grey, that it does become a far richer experience. It's no surprise when we think about black and white photography, that quite often a lot of us will jump immediately to black and white landscapes after Wandsville Adams. Photographed, you know, extremely famous black and white landscapes. And most of the landscape photography that I certainly am drawn towards is black and white. And there's two photographers who I'd like to look at today because they come from very different perspectives or different sides of this landscape coin. One of them is Sally Mann, who we will get on to in a second. And the other is Hengie Congeroro. And again, I'm terribly sorry if I mispronounced that. But I saw his photographs and I was immediately, and I'm seriously immediately captivated by them. There was something in them, this quietness and obviously now minimalist sort of still zen like photographs are not necessarily unusual. They are not rare. There's quite a lot of that around. But there was something about it. There was something about the way that these particular photographs had been composed, had been crafted. That individual tree was allowing to, was allowed to somehow reach out and grab me from the screen. That it impacted me almost immediately. In a way that again, I find difficult to somewhat express. And I feel that when you photograph in black and white, that because we are taking away all of that color, which I mentioned earlier, that we are allowing the subject to be itself. To be the true version of itself that is not invited or impacted by the color that is all around it. That our emotions are not being influenced and tickled and teased and confused by color. So in anything, it's actually more colorful. These photographs are more colorful because they have no color. Because they now have not somebody who's elbowing their way in to tell you what you should think. But that quiet little delicate thing that's in the photograph that's going at the back, just hello, hello. Is allowed to speak its full voice. I love that. I love that about black and white photography. I love the fact that we see things that make us, that still me, that make myself calm. Sally Mann is most famous for all her pictures of her family and some of the more controversial pictures. But she is also very focused on images of the land, of the world. And this is where atmosphere starts to come into play. Just as much as with Henchke's photographs, they have an atmosphere of calm and of quiet and still. I dare say like a zen sort of quality. Sally Mann's photographs, these landscapes have a very different feel to them. Not only are they photographed on equipment that has within it inherently, I'd say disjointed, maybe the wrong way. But it's old technology. It's imperfect. It is extremely organic. A lot of the results and a lot of what comes out of it is nothing to do with her. It's to do with the process itself. And I love when she's photographing in the South, in America, with these steamy, almost swampy scenes. I imagine she's in South Virginia or somewhere in that sort of region. There's not quite the deep South, but it's getting there and stuff. And there's the Spanish moss in the trees and everything feels a lot more primeval. A lot more primordial is probably a better way of saying it. And she's tapping into, again, this feeling that I think if you were to do it in colour, if you were to photograph these scenes in colour that they wouldn't have. A, they wouldn't have this wonderful tonality. They wouldn't have these deep blacks that were inky and hiding things that we may feel slightly uncomfortable about. Because of course, if you photograph in colour and have these deep blacks, any colour that's in there because it's next to a darker colour becomes more bright environment. So rather than the shadow being the main feature, which you so often find in black and white photography, you would find that the colours, the greens of the trees or the blues of the skies and stuff would start dominating. So you look at these images and you see that it's a far richer experience because once again, we're not allowing the colour to dominate. Of course, the irony with black and white photography is that we can't actually see in black and white. You know, we see the world in colour. So back in the day, you needed a special way of kind of understanding how the tones would register with black and white film. Now, remember when I was a student that on the list of equipment that they sent to us, there was a thing called a Ratten 90 filter. And this was actually a magical device that all of a sudden, it's been due to my untrained eyes, started showing me a world that was hidden right there in place. Much like, remember the old predator things, you know, where you put on the mask and it would go into infrared and all those sort of things. The Ratten 90 did that. It showed me that right in front of me, there was this world in tones of grey, you know, you fix it in front of your eyes. And all of a sudden, the world looked very different. And that's what I love about black and white photography. I love about photography in general, is that when you see the world for more than it is, then you start being able to make the photographs far more powerful because you're showing the viewer something that they see every day, something that they recognize in a way that impacts them differently. In photography, photographing the human figure, the torso, is hardly revolutionary, especially in black and white photography. However, I was struck by these photographs by Baba Khaji when I was researching this video because of two things. One of which is the fact that he is photographing a male figure, rather than a female figure, and that is somewhat unusual. And that lends itself, or lends the torso itself, a wiry sort of feel that is infinitely suited to this idea of tonality, this kind of roughness. And the way it's been lit is bringing out the shape and the form of the body in a way that you don't necessarily get with a female form, which is quite often portrayed as formal sort of curvaceous and soft and inviting. Whereas these forms feel a little bit harder, they feel a little bit more angry, they feel a little bit less inviting, especially when you look at some of the contortions that Baba is creating in these photographs. They are tense and they are a twisted thing which kind of, I suppose, goes quite well with that wiry feel to the figure itself. Then also putting the torso into a landscape, making it part of the landscape, but not a dominant, here I'm photographing somebody in a landscape, it's making the landscape almost the dominant and then introducing the torso. And of course with black and white, when you do this with black and white, is that you are playing tricks on the mind, that you are sort of saying, well where does the landscape start and where does the person begin or vice versa. It's very hard to do this with colour photography and that leads me neatly to the photographer who I think is probably one of the greatest exponents of black and white photography in the world today. Sebastiano Saigardo is maybe controversially for me to say this, but I don't really care. He is one of the greatest black and white photographers working today. His photographs encapsulate everything that we have talked about in this video, we have looked at the idea of tonality, of the absence of colour, allowing story to come through, of all of these things, of emotion, of feeling, of atmosphere. Just look at this photograph of all these mind workers in this open-cast mind digging gold out almost with their bare hands in the depths of the Amazon rainforest. Because this photograph is in black and white, we cannot tell within that mud and filth and horror, I think this horror is probably the right word, to where the mind ends and the people begin. These people are the mind and the mind is them. If you are not familiar with Saigardo's work then I would highly recommend you check out this video here because his mastery of black and white is unparalleled. Thank you ever so much for watching and I'll see you again soon.