The dilemma between black and white and color has accompanied photography ever since the first chromatic negative appeared in late nineteenth-century laboratories.
The issue is far from a purely technical decision because it has accumulated ethical, political and philosophical overtones that shape not only the way an image is read but also the way the public judges the person behind the camera.
The standard narrative claims that black and white, by stripping the world of its natural chroma, distills the essence of form and forces attention onto light, texture and gesture. Color, in contrast, is often described as a more hedonistic or sensorial approach and, depending on context, even a commercial one. That binary outline oversimplifies a much richer history in which industrial processes, government bans, academic prejudices, editorial strategies and the private voice of each author all intersect.
For much of the twentieth century black and white was not a manifesto but the only viable option in the press and in most artisanal labs. Color emulsions were expensive, slow to develop and unpredictable in their fidelity. The myth of monochrome truth was constructed later, after technique stopped being an imposition and became a conscious decision. Photographers such as Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson adopted greyscale for practical reasons and because the magazines that funded their trips did not print in color. Decades later academic critics attributed to that palette a moral weight: black and white, they said, removes distraction, preserves the dignity of the subject and enriches semiotic reading. The irony is that Frank himself later confessed he would have used color had the process been as fast and discreet as black and white. The ethical aura arrived afterward; invisible industrial constraints did the ideological work in silence.
Color took time to gain legitimacy among Western gallerists and museums. When William Eggleston showed his dye-transfer prints at MoMA in 1976, much of the critical press dismissed them as banal precisely because of their garish chromaticism, then associated with advertising, tourist postcards and family snapshots. That rejection was not only about visual preference but about a cultural hierarchy that placed the popular at the lowest rung of art. Thus aesthetics blended with social class: black and white belonged to the literate elite, color to the masses. Eggleston flipped the hierarchy and turned saturated color into an emblem of poetic ambiguity. His triumph shows that the ethics attributed to chromatic choice is not intrinsic to the image but to the social fabric that judges it.
Newsrooms, however, continued feeding the idea that black and white guarantees objectivity. During the Vietnam War the New York Times printed photographs in grey, citing reasons of ink and journalistic seriousness. Color, editors argued, trivialized violence. That supposed neutrality wavered when European magazines, using more advanced offset processes, showed red blood on green jungle and sparked a political backlash. Confronted with pigment-true carnage, the public reacted more viscerally than to desaturated equivalents. Ethical impact then changed sides: color revealed what indulgent grey allowed the viewer to abstract. Again, morality depended on publication context rather than on the physics of light.
With digital photography the dichotomy became reversible at a click. Turning a file to monochrome became just another post-production option, light enough to make any ethical dilemma seem to evaporate. Yet the gesture of desaturation started to serve as an instant badge of seriousness on social media. Faced with an overabundance of saturated filters, many newcomers discovered that greyscale offered immediate gravitas. That superficial appropriation reignited debate. Is black and white an easy shortcut to depth for scenes that might lack it, or does it remain a language with its own grammar of contrast and luminosity capable of telling stories color dilutes?
The discussion grows more intricate if we consider today’s technology. Bayer sensors capture color by default and the camera’s algorithm interpolates the final file; a digital black and white photograph is not absence of color but a reconstruction of luminance from RGB channels. Anyone seeking pure photon-based greyscale must use a dedicated monochrome sensor, an expensive and marginal option. Here an ethical nuance appears: converting to grey in post means the color decision existed at capture time even if later erased. Can the author claim the creative sincerity of choosing a language in situ while shooting on hardware designed for color? Some purists argue that honest black and white demands thinking and exposing exclusively for that outcome, anticipating how bright zones and deep shadows will interlock, just as a painter picks oil or watercolor before laying the first stroke.
Meanwhile, in regions where chemical labs are scarce, digital color has become the only accessible route. Young photographers in West Africa or Southeast Asia create intense visual discourses leveraging local chromatic richness: wax fabrics, street neons, jungle landscapes. To demand monochrome as a universal aesthetic would impose a colonial gaze that historically muted that vibrancy. Color then becomes a political declaration, an act of resistance against the Eurocentric homogeneity that for decades canonized grey as the sole vehicle of high art.
Yet abandoning greyscale outright would censor expressive tools still relevant. A high-contrast portrait can emphasize wrinkles, scars and bone structure without the interference of skin tones; an urban nightscape can acquire metaphysical weight by shedding the chromatic cues of billboards and traffic lights; a moving body can narrate rhythm and tension solely through shades of grey. Each choice, if well reasoned, adds conceptual depth. Trouble arises when it reduces to an automatic gesture, a marketing formula or a retro fetish that hides the absence of a personal gaze.
The key to escaping the ethical trap is clarity of purpose. A photographer should ask why the color is removed or preserved. If the answer rests on commercial convenience or market pressure, the result risks becoming generic. If it stems from narrative necessity because the subject’s memory evokes family albums in black and white, because the project converses with historical archives, because color would distract from geometry then the decision is organic and defensible. Ethics shifts from moral abstraction to internal coherence.
Teaching should foster that critical questioning instead of glorifying dogma. A useful exercise is to have students shoot the same scene in color and in black and white, then argue how the reading changes and why. They will discover that certain textures blossom once saturation disappears, and that some color dialogues lose their spark in grey. In that constructive contrast each author finds a personal compass. The goal is not to choose a definitive side but to accept that the power of photography lies in its controlled ambiguity.
History suggests that significant advances occur when boundaries become porous. The chemical trio of black and white negative, color negative and slide is already obsolete; now we live with multispectral sensors, consumer infrared cameras and software that simulates extinct emulsions. The ethical question will shift to new territories. What does it mean to fake skin temperature to fit advertising standards, how does documentary credibility fare when an infrared frame gets mapped into visible palette? Eventually the original dichotomy will reveal itself as merely one chapter in a broader debate about truth, intention and interpretation.
In an era where images travel without context, adding context becomes an act of responsibility. Captioning whether the file was captured in color, converted to monochrome or selectively toned helps viewers judge honestly. This is not moralism but transparency, turning ethics from a puritan label into an invitation to dialogue: I show you not only what I see but also how and why I processed it.
Ultimately the divide between black and white and color remains as alive as the dilemmas over cropping or post-processing intervention. The answer does not lie in universal formulas but in the critical awareness of the person behind the camera and the editor at the screen. Choosing a palette is not a menu tic, it is an act of meaning. When the photographer recognizes that weight, the chromatic decision can become poetic gesture or political statement; when ignored, it risks coating the image with an aesthetic patina that promises depth but delivers habit. Perhaps the true challenge is not choosing black and white or color, but building a personal grammar that justifies each desaturation, each burst of red, each skin rendered as a map of light. Only then does photography regain its original power: to show how we see so the world resonates with new readings beyond dogmas and nostalgia.
