One of the strange gifts of black and white photography is that no one ever asks, "Is that how it really looked?"
With colour—especially digital—this question is always lurking. The saturation, the warmth of the light, the shadows, the contrast: every part of a digital image can be pushed and pulled. You can make a grey morning glow like a golden hour. You can turn a dull sky blue. You can erase blemishes, adjust curves, and clone out anything you don’t like. And people know this. That’s the problem. We’ve trained ourselves to question what we see. Is it real, or is it PhotoShop?
Black and white sidesteps that whole conversation. It doesn’t pretend to be a faithful record of the way things looked. There is no colour. The honesty of black and white is in its abstraction. It doesn’t claim to be real—it just is. Light, tone, shape, texture. A world reduced to its bones.
That reduction opens up options. You don’t need the golden light of sunrise to shoot a black and white landscape. You don’t need the lush green of spring to shoot a field. You don’t even need a subject that “looks good” in colour. With black and white, it’s all about how it feels.
That feeling runs deep. Photography started in black and white. For a long time, it was the only option. And when colour came along, it was rightly celebrated—imagine seeing the world suddenly rendered in Kodachrome after a lifetime of greys. But colour film still had rules. Each emulsion had a distinct look. The results were shaped by the film you used, not endlessly alterable.
Digital changed that. It removed the limits. Anything became possible. And with that, we lost something: the constraints that used to anchor our choices, and the trust that used to anchor our images.
So here we are, in a strange moment. Black and white—always abstract, never literal—may now carry more truth than colour. It doesn’t try to convince you that it looked that way. It just shows you what the photographer saw, or felt, or wanted to say.
That’s one of the joys of shooting black and white film. No questions asked.