Φωτογράφος
The black and white photograph was liberated from the burden of the so-called artistic monopoly at the moment when color photography achieved the necessary technical perfection. Now, a photographer must understand the reasons that will make them choose a black and white reality. The decision cannot simply rely on the choice of film, as in the past, but must invoke much more conscious and experienced criteria. Moreover, these conveniences require more knowledge and increased sensitivity for their utilization.
Black and white photography seeks and sustains much greater artistic processing and formalist exaggerations without betraying the necessary photographic authenticity. The sea in a photograph may be whitish or blackish, but never yellow.
Black and white resists on its own, much better than color, dangerous attractive influences such as the semantics of advertising, the aesthetics of television, the allure of the art market, the extremity of minimalism, and the exaggeration of realism.
Black and white exploits areas without information, like absolute black and absolute white, and allows them to function as abstract poetic elements. The white at the top of a landscape can be the sky, but it remains a white mass. In color, the sky always has color and is always the sky.
Black and white is not a color photograph from which colors have been artificially removed, nor is color a tinted black and white. It represents a comprehensive way to convey the world. In one case, the colors are evident, and in the other, the photographer trusts their presence in the viewer's imagination. That's why we often prefer a black and white nature, since we know its colors mentally, but colored objects, which the photographer "paints" with his photograph.
Black and white will represent, for many more years, the precious deposit that constitutes the masterpieces of one and a half centuries of photography.
Finally, nothing prevents a photographer who has understood the above from moving between black and white and colored reality, since for them it will always be about a poetic reality.
Plato Rivellis