There are many reasons why I choose to stick to black and white photography, among them the abstraction of the image, the connection to the history of photography, and the fact that I just like the aesthetic. Another, more prosaic, reason is the fact that I am by now very familiar with the process — from exposure through development to printing — and that I can actually do it with my own resources, in my own home darkroom.
I have started wanting to introduce colour over the last year, but not in such a way that I lose the abstraction. There are certain initial principles to follow. Firstly, the colours are to be desaturated. Toning is actually quite good for this. Secondly, the use of colour is to be conceptual, rather than representative, by which I mean the purpose is to make allusions rather than to give a faithful account of the object being coloured. This means that the resultant image can still be predominantly monochrome, and that the colours used do not necessarily need to correspond to the original object, nor to specific groups of objects, nor to reality. Sometimes, for example, I want to make connections between groups of objects for which that connection did not actually exist.
My first attempt was this interpretation of a photo I took in India. It was taken with a Leica camera using an 70-year-old lens. The tone of the walls and the stairs was identical, except for the staining and flaking away of paint, and of course, in the photo, the shadows. I wanted to accentuate the geometry of the image, however, and so used selective copper toning to tone different sections at various saturations. This extended to the sky and trees in the center of the picture. One section of the sky, however, I coloured a desaturated blue, using very dilute pigment, to give the impression of a shard of reality apparent behind the facade of a scene as it is perceived. Something I have learnt, by the way, is that these pigments, at these high dilutions, are subject to fading. Toners would be more permanent.
I used a similar idea for this photo taken in Aberdeen, Scotland, in the grounds of the place I was staying in. The way the planks of wood in the wreckage cut across the picture lended itself to this idea of seeing reality only partially, through a section of the scene. Again, I used very dilute pigments to keep the colours desaturated. Another point about this is that adding colour blends more naturally if done on a toned print, rather than a straight black and white one, on which the addition of colour would be too stark.
I used this natural colouring on several other prints, such as these two from the parks. Again, the use is partial, the colours desaturated.
The above photo is, I think, the last one I shall take in the parks, for that particular series. I have lost my appetite for the subject. This is one of only two pictures I could find the enthusiasm to take on my last visit, but there is something that I like about it. The slight diagonal of the lower arm corresponding to the leaning tree, compared with verticality of the upper arm corresponding to the tree in the background, perhaps.
Finally, an attempt to abstract out elements within a perfectly normal scene.
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