The presence of black and white in contemporary imagery
Eliminating color from a production, although it may seem a simple subtraction, is actually a way to reorganize visual senses. It is to accept that each shadow, each glow, each texture tells a story that color often dilutes and interrupts perceptions.
Thus, when choosing black and white as a language, the image changes its function, from representation to a tension and a meticulous field of analysis. In this light, it is worth looking at three contemporary artists, with distinct histories, who opt for the use of monochrome in parts of their works, whose images challenge this analysis: Gabriel Moses, Luiz Braga, and Sebastião Salgado.
Gabriel Moses, a London-born photographer and filmmaker, was born in 1998, and uses black and white out of pure visual ancestry. “Regina”, his debut short film, is entirely shot in black and white, and is perhaps his most intimate work. Moses has commented that the film is about his Nigerian roots, his grandmother, and his relationship with the feminine and the sacred. The choice for B&W here is not a purely formal choice; it is a moment to create a layer of temporal and spiritual distance. It gives the images an almost liturgical timelessness.
Primarily used to accentuate skin texture, bodily expression, and gestural language, it is a way of not competing with color, but rather placing the gaze directly on what is being said with the body.
Luiz Braga, on the other hand, brings another geography and another time. A photographer from Pará, Braga began documenting the everyday life of Belém at age 11. He became known for the intensely colored images of cabocla culture, but his relationship with black and white is older.
In 1987, after years of photographing in color, he returned to monochrome with The Margin of the Gaze, a series that earned him the Marc Ferrez award. There, Braga chooses to set aside color not as a technical limitation but as a strategy for focus and density. The Amazonian margins take on a rawer, more detailed form, without chromatic deviation. It is at this point that some analyses arise, such as: what does black and white allow us to see that color dissolves?
Sebastião Salgado took this logic to the extreme. Since the 1980s, his photographic series such as Workers, Exodus, and Amazônia elevated black and white to a sort of universal language of pain, resistance, and human monumentality.
His images are not just documentation; they are symbolic constructions, archetypes of the human condition. By opting for B&W, Salgado projects these figures into a suspended time, the garimpeiro, the migrant, the indigenous, the refugee, not as newspaper characters, but as figures of historical and profound records. The same in an interview says:
This is not an isolated choice. In documentary photography, Mariana Cook captured one of the most famous portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama in 1996, before any political projection. The image, made in gelatin silver, shows the young couple sitting on their couch at home in Chicago, with extreme simplicity. But the black and white makes the scene seem inevitable, as if the political destiny was already written there.
In cinema, black and white was the norm for decades, but it has never ceased to be a choice. Directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Bresson, Bergman, Fellini all used monochrome not because of a lack of alternatives, but to create a narrative necessity. Today, directors like David Fincher (Mank), Alfonso Cuarón (Roma), Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse), or Alexander Payne (Nebraska) return to B&W as a rupture.
The technique behind it also reinforces the meaning. The Zone System, a technique created by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer, proposed mapping shades of gray in specific zones to calibrate light and exposure even before clicking. It was a way to project the image in the mind before capturing it. A tonal architecture project. This requires the photographer to have mastery, precision, and a clear vision of the atmosphere they want to create.
There is also an emotional dimension; studies such as those by the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (APA) indicate that monochromatic images evoke feelings such as melancholy, nostalgia, and introspection more frequently than their colored counterparts. The radical contrast between light and shadow activates a specific psychological zone. This absence of color generates a visual silence that often brings us closer, raises questions, and creates a unique visual density.
In times of constant stimulation, the choice for black and white seems contradictory. But perhaps that is exactly why it becomes necessary. Eliminating distractions, returning to gesture, to look, to forms — this in a saturated time.
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