B&W Tonality

On Saturday, my friend and photographer extraordinaire Dennis Livesey posted a link to a photo taken by famed fine art photographer, David Yarrow. It was a shot taken on the Durango and Silverton Railroad in southwestern Colorado. It sparked quite a discourse among Dennis’ Facebook friends, many of whom are among the very best that one can find in the specialized world of railroad photography. The discussion featured both supporters and detractors of the photo. I’ll admit to being one of the critical voices in what wasn’t one of my most eloquent criticisms ever. Nevertheless, I stand by what I said about the tonality of both that particular image and Yarrow’s current western work as a whole. I’m not a fan.

What’s interesting is that I do like a lot of Yarrow’s work. He’s been on my radar ever since Amanda and I went to Africa. It’s hard to miss Yarrow’s east Africa work, particularly of some of the “big tuskers” at Amboseli. They’re iconic photos of truly iconic animals. They make you want to go to Amboseli. A lot. The contrast is high in those photos but it’s a contrasty place and there was still a lot of detail throughout the images. They’re pleasing to the eye for sure.

The picture that Dennis shared from the High Line of the Durango and Silverton Railroad took things to another level, with regards to contrast. The tones are overtly harsh. The shadows are crushed with no detail. The midtones fair slightly better but they’re still “chalk and charcoal.” The highlights are again blasted. It just doesn’t work for me. As I said on Dennis’ post, it feels like a film newbie that discovered a YouTube video on push processing ISO 400 film up to 3200 and decided to try it out. Not quite what I expect from someone like Yarrow.

It made me think quite a bit about what I’m looking for in a B&W photo, both as a B&W photographer and as a fan of B&W work in general. I think by default, I prefer the look that film B&W masters could achieve while using big cameras, good glass and slow film. David Plowden‘s shot of Station Agent RH Birkhead comes to mind. There are tones for days in that shot! And it’s not lacking for contrast. There are plentiful tones from deep blacks on up to creamy whites. The key is that there are a zillion middle greys in between and they’re all subtle, quiet and play nice with their neighbors. The tonality is just sumptuous.

I find that certain subjects just cry out for that kind of tonal balance. Railroading in general and steam locomotives in particular top that list for me. They’re fantastically complex machines with tones running the gamut from the blackest black short of Anish Kapoor and his Vantablack up to super bright highlights. Certain parts like the shiny rods are especially tonally rich. Match a good lens with nice microcontrast to them and they just pop off of the paper of a good print.

Indeed, one of the things I love most about shooting large format in general and 8×10 in particular is that the negative is so darned big that it has lots and lots of silver available which allows for very, very smooth tonal transitions. It’s a magic look for me.

Of course, that’s just me. I know that there are a lot of practitioners around the web who can’t help but shoot, process and print for lots of hard contrast. It’s not my thing but I understand the appeal. I think the key point for any B&W photographer to figure out is what they want their end product to look like. By its very nature, B&W photography is automatically abstracting our subjects. By removing color from the equation, the whole B&W experience is venturing into a realm of creative control and it is up to each photographer to figure out what she/he wants.

In closing out my thoughts in a response to Dennis on Facebook the day after the Yarrow kerfuffle, I stated:

…there are three really key points to this whole thing, though. The first is that all art is subjective and we all have our preferences. If we all made the same pictures the same way, it’d be a boring world for sure. The second is that every picture needs to be what the photographer wants it to be and sometimes that means venturing outside of her/his norms (indeed, I can point to harsh, contrasty shots that I’ve posted for artistic effect). And finally and probably most importantly, my opinion doesn’t matter a whit. I’m just a guy that likes to play with cameras. Yarrow is pulling in 7 figures from his photography and is far more successful than I could ever even imagine to be. So my humble little opinion in one corner of social media is about as useful as horseshoes on a Hyundai.

The one thing that I think I’d add to the response is that the element that I mentioned above: what matters most on the part of the photographer is intent. We live in a fascinating photographic world where one can easily work with a host of photographic processes from Daguerreotypes to the latest digital wonders that Canon/Nikon/Sony and the rest are always bettering. Post processing options from traditional gelatin silver prints to ethereal platinum/palladium prints to archival pigment prints from desktop printers to a host of alternative processes, etc. In short, we live in an era that if you can dream it, it’s probably possible to make it one way or another. I remember Phil Greenspun once remarking that “studio photography is easy because you can get exactly what you want. Studio photography is hard because you can get exactly what you want.” I think that’s true of B&W photography, too. Sometimes, the toughest part is just figuring out what you want and then it’s easy to figure out how to get it with all of the tools we have at our discretion. Pursuing B&W photography with intent is the key. So what is it that you want to say?