Theory about black and white films and photos from the past

[Duende]

I have been watching and thoroughly enjoying discovery history's world war two in colour. What struck me was how the use of colour made what looked so ghostly and detached from now, seem so current. It reminded me of the bit in The Dead Poet's Society where Keeting points to an old photo of a class of boys from yesteryear, in black and white. He infiltrates their feeling of indestructibility by saying to them that the young men in the picture had the same hair cuts as them and also the same look of optimism in their eyes.

 

Given the improved quality of modern photographs and visual improvements in tv and video etc, I wonder if future generations will relate more to 'now', ie in hundreds of years in the future will the people relate to our history, social dilemmas and even triumphs!

 

Or

 

will the people of the day always view the past as something that is separate and think they know better (despite the photos and videos depicting people that are more 'relatable')

 

Matt

[damian]

Gotta ponder all that.......I do know that most people who grew up watching B&W TV usually dream in B&W, and people who grow up watching TV in color usually dream in color.......

 

I think that people in the present will always view the past as the past..........I'll have periods of time when looking at photos and films with people now gone seems eerie.......

 

There are "medium" abilities that allow a few to "see" what others miss.............

[liquidfusion]

I may be misinterpreting the overall question, but that happens as Im pretty much an ordinary country boy. I think Jamey Johnson said it best when he said "If it looks like we were scared to death, just a couple of kid's tryin to save each other.....You should have seen it in color...."

 

Bruce

[Golem]

`

 

 

Today's "high quality" color stills and

videos lack the lifesized holographic

full dimensionality of what is likely to

be the next generation's medium of

casual personal imaging.

 

Therefore, today's crude "high quality"

images will look just as quaint as your

grandmother's wedding album. IOW,

divorced from reality, in those future

viewers' contemporary terms of reality.

 

Everything is relative and subjective,

and most especially reality.

 

Frinstintz, spoze you die, and cease to

be here, same as before you were born.

So, were you ever actually "real" ? Or

were you just a mutually agreed-upon

set of terms among some other entities

whose "reality" is equally as subjective,

and ephemeral, as your own ?

 

The closer our recording technology

can approximate our "objective reality"

in facsimile form, the less we trust our

"objective reality" to be really real.

 

 

`

[cookieman15061]

The only pictures kids look at today is one in a text message.

[milod]

Matt...

 

This will sound terrible, but I think we'll never again have the number of photos we had in the black and white days, at least not proportionally to the number of photos "shot" or printed.

 

The problem as I see it is that since photography was invented, each succeeding generation of photos is less durable in ways. The metal-backed photo remains functional. The old wet plate glass "negatives" including the "positive" Ambrotype is on glass and lasts nearly as long as the glass.

 

Some of the early plastic-type negative material for Mr. Eastman's "instantaneous dry plates" were not very good. Some later types last better. But in black and white you have a silver crystal sort of deposit onto the negative that can last a long time if the plastic backing does.

 

Color photos are dyes that fade, some much more rapidly than others. Color film and slides are inherently relatively short-lived.

 

Now we're digital but... will JPG last for a century in terms of usability? I dunno.

 

Also as a newspaper guy who has seen tens of thousands of negatives dumped into the trash, and who is aware of more than that many JPG files similarly dumped, I fear we may be seeing the "early" digital age as one in which the photo is not valued. What is left in 50 years or a century is anyone's guess. I personally fear that the cell phone cameras will almost certainly have few downloads and others will be gone. The pocket dedicated digital camera already is on the way out and the more professional models also are seeing a bit of decline in sales, especially compared to population numbers.

 

So... I dunno. In theory a JPG should last as long as the medium on which they are saved. But a CD has perhaps a 5-year life, depending on who you talk to. As we "upgrade" our computers, we tend to dump a lot of material, including especially photos.

 

Again, will we have software to read all the JPG files in a century? I dunno. I have one old film scanner attached to an old Mac. Period. It gives the equivalent of about a 2.5 megapixel camera from a 35 mm negative - at least until it dies.

 

How much else in film will be lost? I dunno.

 

How much that's in a digital format will be lost? I dunno.

 

Sad, I think.

 

m

[LarryUK]

I grew up with b+w tv. Don't forget that you can't miss what you've never had. So. B+w was fine. Then when we had a colour tv. Wow! I do think as time goes by the talent is going from all walks of life. You can adjust and change anything now. Be it photo, music, art etc.

Funny that all of my life only one thing has stayed top of the game. A Les Paul. I can't remember when anything has topped it. I should imagine that in a hundred years from now it'll still be sold in it's current form.

[Golem]

`

 

 

I should imagine that in a hundred years from

now it'll still be sold in it's current form.

`

Could be true, but only IF there persists

some context in which to play an antique,

manually-operated, analog electric ax.

 

 

The Leica-M cameras were the Les Pauls

of photographic gear. As recently as ten

yrs ago, one often read in the online photo

forums, "I'm gonna get an M-Leica. Leica

just overhauled my dad's 40 yr old 'M' so

it's like new again etc etc blah blah." And

I'd always respond that the writer was not

very realistic if he expects the next 40 yrs

to resemble the previous 40 yrs.

 

I'm just such a party pooper .....

 

 

 

 

`

[Mr. Natural]

When I was a kid, I sat through hours and hours of B&W newsreels (News on the March!) at the theater waiting for the feature films (stuff like Hercules Unchained or The Killer Shrews). B&W still seems as "real" to me, if not more so, as color.

[TommyK]

I have been watching and thoroughly enjoying discovery history's world war two in colour. What struck me was how the use of colour made what looked so ghostly and detached from now, seem so current. It reminded me of the bit in The Dead Poet's Society where Keeting points to an old photo of a class of boys from yesteryear, in black and white. He infiltrates their feeling of indestructibility by saying to them that the young men in the picture had the same hair cuts as them and also the same look of optimism in their eyes.

 

Given the improved quality of modern photographs and visual improvements in tv and video etc, I wonder if future generations will relate more to 'now', ie in hundreds of years in the future will the people relate to our history, social dilemmas and even triumphs!

 

Or

 

will the people of the day always view the past as something that is separate and think they know better (despite the photos and videos depicting people that are more 'relatable')

 

Matt

 

 

They'll be just like you Matt. They will view it from the perspective of the then current technology vs. the 'old school' technology. "Wow, it looks so distant and 'ghostly' when it's on paper instead of a 3D image of our forebears we can shake hands with and converse with."

 

I suspect my Great-great-grandfather had to come to terms with a high definition rendering of people he knew with all the details in the right place. He called it 'tin type.' "Imagine that."

[dem00n]

I rather take a black and white photo over a color photos most of the time.

Shows more emotion in some cases if you ask me...

[retrosurfer1959]

Black and white photos are still popular in many artist hands because the use of negative space is so thought provoking and beautiful - digital camera's are the modern version of polaroids for quick snaps but a truly high end digital photograph printed on archival paper will still last 100's of years if cared for, so it's like everything else in this disposable society unless something changes and we value the images there won't be any. Sadly same with books and the new digital readers. A bright spot though is some people especially artists are going back to the old mediums. I teach art classes for adults and this next semester I'm teaching Letterpress printing and book binding and Black and white photography on medium format cameras bot technology that was in vogue 100 years ago and my classes are both already full.

 

The letterpress is taught on a Heidelberg press from 1918 that I have restored completely and spent years collecting type. It's a true piece of american history and to me nothing shows Americas pride of building more than the old presses they are amazing pieces of art.

[badbluesplayer]

One thing that's better about digital photos is that the colors are truer. Every one of the old films had it's own peculiar limitations. But I'm like Milod - I'm kind of worried that I might lose all my photos when my computer dies or something else happens that I don't anticipate.

 

Another cool thing about digital is how easy it is to edit the photos, including the colors. You can make B&W, sepia toned photos and stuff like that.

[ksdaddy]

dem00n nailed it. I look back on album pics and it's almost like the b&w photos captured the persons identity or aura better than the color ones. I can't say it in fancy words, but I can be flipping through an old album with color pics and all of a sudden stumble on a bunch of pics I took with my old Petri rangefinder or Canon FTb and Tri-X b&w and think, my GOD those are good pics. No reflection on my photography skills, just that.... I dunno, b&w is just so revealing. Maybe it's because I'm not drawn to or distracted by the colors and see the subject matter with more clarity.

[Duende]

Jeez those WW2 pictures fascinate me so much and I am wondering why!

 

Disregarding the artistic merits of black and white vs colour (yes I prefer black and white too) and also durability and for arguments sake assuming the pictures are printed on a special paper that lasts ;) I think with the pictures today - eg video and still pictures - looking so much like their real life subjects, leaves less to the imagination which yes - while less artistic - as the imagination has less to do reconstructing the image/s, makes them more 'real' possibly...

 

But to Milo; I read your post and see what you mean (I think!) There is a possible paradox here with things being realistic. The paradox being that just because something looks more like something else, it doesn't mean the feeling of the atmosphere comes through and makes it more relatable and therefore realistic...it almost goes a full 360 degrees and becomes so real it becomes cold and detached and unreal!!

ie IF in the future; pictures of the Iraq conflict (for arguments sake they were printed well and preserved) were shown to youngsters, maybe even though they looked like they were taken in the youngsters life time; to the youngsters viewing them, they may feel a detachment still as the perfectness of the picture lacks the soul of the pictures of say the second world war.

 

Here is my uncle who drowned aged 19 in WW2. He was on a small boat on a military exercise when the boat capsized. My mum's mum meanwhile unaware of where her son was, was asleep on the sofa. She woke up in a cold sweat saying to my mum, then a girl, that she had experienced a terrible dream where Harry (the young man below) was "up to his neck in water and calling for her"

 

 

Not long after wards my mum and her mother were informed of Harry's death and it was the same day (and approximate time) she had woken to that terrible dream . That is a true story...

 

 

Matt

[milod]

Retro...

 

I hate to say this, but letterpress printing is part of my life. <grin> My first job in the biz was testing ink and paper for big heatset presses. Then when I returned to college and then got "seduced" into writing and taking pix full time for a daily newspaper stedda finishing school, it was letterpress. The job shop was upstairs. Yeah, I probably still could read type in forms on a turtle backwards and upside down.

 

The reproduction varied. To get good halftones you pretty much hadda do a zinc. That was rough and didn't translate well to news inks and paper much over a 60 line screen. That's part of why offset was so popular even though it certainly killed a lot of the old printing trades.

 

You also talk about medium format cameras. I used a TLR quite a bit in my early days. Still "see" in black and white which really is light and shadow. A lotta the younger set of photojournalists see, I think, more in color which likely is why a lotta newspaper pix nowadays seem awfully flat compared to what the older "shooters" tended to do even in color.

 

BTW, my own first printed newspaper color shot was with an old swings and tilts press camera with sheet film or a "fancy new" roll film back.

 

I also think I'm one of the few old-line photogs who's done wet darkroom unsharp masks and such stuff. But that's a long, long time ago now.

 

Matt... & others RE b/w stuff...

 

Yeah, there is something ... spiritual ... about some good black and white, even colorized which I've done myself in PhotoShop with some old rodeo pix. I think it comes back to perceiving light and shadows rather than "color." The mere concept of "shadow" is something different and, perhaps in the broadest sense, spiritual in some way.

 

However... I don't think that's what's being taught nowadays. Contrast tends instead, I think, to be taught in colors rather than shadows. But maybe that's just an old man talking.

 

Music: The shades of music are similar, I think too. Much current music I hear is heavy... as in heavy shadow and little light. The contrast is lost, and the grays in between. The old film noir kinda had too much contrast perhaps, but... consider the BW photography in something like Casablanca...

 

m

[MANNIC]

Gotta ponder all that.......I do know that most people who grew up watching B&W TV usually dream in B&W, and people who grow up watching TV in color usually dream in color.......

 

I think that people in the present will always view the past as the past..........I'll have periods of time when looking at photos and films with people now gone seems eerie.......

 

There are "medium" abilities that allow a few to "see" what others miss.............

I dream in black and white if I'm having one of my dreaded Sgt. Bilko dreams.