The Saturday Morning Post: Better in Black and White or Color?

In the winter of 1991 -92, I was living alone in the house in Orlando, and I emptied out a nice sized walk-in closet and set up a simple black and white darkroom.  I hadn't done any lab work in over a decade, and decided I wanted to see what I could do.  I loaded the Canon F1 with Ilford HP4 and spent a few days off being artistic.  Then developed the film, and spent a couple of delightful evenings making prints.  Black and White photographic printmaking is a mixture of art, science and magic.  Minor changes of focus, lens aperture, and timing along with meticulous processing bring the image to life.  The paper is plain white when it comes out of a light proof package.  You expose it for a few seconds on an enlarger, a very high quality projector.  It is still a blank page.  You slide it into a developing solution, that changes the chemical makeup of the light sensitive silver on the surface of the paper, making the parts that have been exposed to white light turn darker, in a magic spectrum from cold white, to the darkest black.  You then move it into a bath that stops that process, and into a fixing solution that removes the silver solution that has not been exposed to light.  At that point it is no longer light sensitive, but needs all of those chemicals washed away, you rinse in gently running water for 20 minutes and dry.  

Rarely is the first print the perfect print.  Minor adjustments are made in exposure setting, and you can manipulate the light in the projection process.  My best all time print, was a 20 second exposure, with some areas having an extra five second, and another having only 15 seconds of light.  

Then process, wash, dry and reexamine for perfection.  

One of the joys of black and white, is this is all done in a special low level light in a limited color spectrum that the paper is not sensitive to.  You watch the image appear, an alchemy of science and magic.  

Color processing is done entirely in the dark.  It can be done in open trays, totally by feel, but most often the exposed paper is processed in some type of a machine - the home machine technology of the 70's and 80's loaded the exposed color paper into a plastic tube with a light proof cap at the end, that allowed chemicals to be poured in and out.  I didn't enjoy color printing the way I enjoyed black and white. 

Back to the last time I did darkroom work in the early 1990's.  I did it as a pure art form, and I was, and I still am, very proud of the results.  There are a couple masterworks of prints hanging next to my desk to this day. Those prints have a story, I framed them and gave them to my parents, and my father's reaction has stuck with me.  He didn't understand why I did black and white when I took such wonderful color photographs. When I was cleaning out his house, I found them in a closet, slipped them in my bag and brought them home.   

I have one of the knobs on my digital camera set to black and white, a simple turn and the image is captured in monochrome. Digital printing lacks the magic, the alchemy, the control that silver halide printing allowed.  I miss it.  When we sold the second house, I gave away the darkroom equipment,  in the condo we simply don't have space for it. I had a hard time finding someone to take it in.