One swallow does not make a ... must be careful not to mix metaphors here, but I did think the recent transmanagement issue was a bit of a sinker. However ...
The B&W mag has been through many changes since I bought issue 15 in 2002. Coming out with a mag dedicated to b&w seemed very courageous at the time ... but then again it seems clear now that the black and white film industry had received a tremendous boost from the impact of digital technology. A sizeable percentage of pro/commercial photographers necessarily dumped their old analogue gear on the s/h market and many an amateur aspiration was realised.
Looking again at issue 15, there are articles on darkroom work and the zone system, and on digital printers and digital post-processing. Of the Reader Gallery all four contributors used film. Of the Reader Gallery in this last issue (77) two contributors used film, and two used digital capture and a b&w conversion in PhotoShop. You want to blame the editor for that?
It doesn't strike me as surprising that a rekindling of the b&w flame would be reflected in the digital arena, after all, at the very least it's quite a simple process to follow if you are already competent in using basic software. The renegade 16 year-olds I teach frequently say how much they prefer looking at b&w photos because b&w stimulates the imagination so much more than colour, making the image concept more 'real'. They shoot pics on a mobile phone, convert them to b&w, and then post them on Bebo or MySpace. It is a process I am very happy to encourage.
I'll be doing a portrait shoot this afternnoon and I'll be packing both analogue (LF) and digital for b&w. Which image gets used won't be my choice as quite simply the selection of the final photo will be down to the image itself ... but it will be black and white.
Which I gather is what the mag is all about. |