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Most of us who learned photography in school, learned basic black and white darkroom processing and never bothered with color. Or we tapped in and tapped out quickly. For one thing, there’s just more chemistry involved in color. But also, color processing has vastly more combinations of possibilities which, in turn, makes decision-making very complex. And it evolves in ways that black and white doesn’t — new film types equal new processing techniques. The complexity of it all made it an overly-technical endeavor that the majority of photographers were all too happy to leave to the labs. The occasional photographer, like Fred Herzog for example, broke the trend and blended the technical with the creative in highly-innovative, and defining ways. But most of us developed a gap in our understanding of color simply from not having our hands on the process. Consequently, we think in terms of film types and general overall looks, rather than with a true understanding of what’s actually happening to our photographs. And this gap has followed us into digital.
As the world of photography veered toward digital, the benefit to black and white photographers was simple: black and white becomes, first and foremost, a matter…
