Black and White vs Color Photographs - Part 1: History | Bergen County Photographer
Photography has come a long way since its invention on the 1820s. It started in black and white, and it was fragile, cumbersome and an expensive process. It was not until the 1970s that color photographs became widespread.
In 1825 Joseph Nicephore Niepce produced a black and white image of a window. This was the first time that reality was captured exactly as it was.
The world's first photograph by Joseph Niepce. Taken from a window of his Le Gras estate at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, it was produced by exposing a bitumen-coated pewter plate in a camera obscura. It took an exposure time of eight hours. (Photo by Joseph Niepce/Getty Images)
Years later, in 1891 Gabriel Lippmann developed a process of making naturally colored photographs. However, black and white photography continued to dominate for a long period of time since the costs of producing a black and white photograph was relatively low and it was the classic look of photography.
A color photograph made by Gabriel Lippmann in the 1890s
By the 1970s, prices started coming down, film sensitivity was improved, and color photography became the norm for snapshot taking nearly pushing black and write photography completely out of use.
The advent of digital photography advanced color photography even further, with it becoming the default and black and white used by choice. This eliminated the need to deal with multiple color films for each lighting situation considering that white balance was now set on camera. Also not paying for the purchase of color film and for processing it lowered the cost of color photography.
Digital image of Russell Kirsch’s son Walden, created by scanning an analogue photograph, 1957.
All these changes in photography transformed the way we see reality. The question is when and why choose black and white photography and how color changed perception of life. I will talk about this on the next post Black and White vs. Color Photographs - Part 2: How to Use.