Many Photographers love black and white photography and here are the 30 best black and white quotes to give you some inspiration.
30.
“In black and white, there are more colors than color photography, because you are not blocked by any colors so you can use your experiences, your knowledge, and your fantasy, to put colors into black and white.”
– Anders Petersen (Born 1944-)
Anders Petersen, as a Swedish photographer, was based in Stockholm and he learned photography under Christer Strömholm Sweden from 1966 to 1967. He is famous for his intimate and personal documentary-style black and white photographs. Petersen has published over 20 books.
29.
“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”
― Ted Grant (1929 (age 92 years)
In Canada, Ted Grant is the most prolific living photographer in Canada and has had a photojournalist job for over 60 years. Recently, he published a new book in 2009, called “Real Photographers Shoot Black and White. Sometimes Colour”.
28.
“Black and white are the colors of photography. To me, they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected”
– Robert Frank (November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019)
Robert Frank was a Swiss photographer and documentary filmmaker. His most well-known work, the 1958 book titled The Americans, earned him comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and nuanced outsider’s view of American society.
27.
“I work in colour sometimes, but I guess the images I most connect to, historically speaking, are in black and white. I see more in black and white – I like the abstraction of it.”
– Mary Ellen Mark (March 20, 1940 – May 25, 2015)
Mary Ellen Mark was a famous American photographer and She is well-known for her photojournalism, documentary photography, portraiture, and advertising photography. She loves photographing people who are away from the “away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes” She published 18 books, and “Streetwise and Ward 81” is the most notable.
26.
“Color is descriptive. Black and white are interpretive.”
– Eliott Erwitt (born Elio Romano Erwitt, July 26, 1928)
Eliott Erwitt, a French-born American, is an advertising and documentary photographer and is famous for its black and white candid photos of ironic and absurd situations within everyday settings. He published many books and Dog Dogs is the most interesting.
25.
“I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.”
– Henri Mattise (31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954)
Henri Matisse was a French Fauvist painter. After 40 years of painting and discovering, He realized that black is the most powerful color.
24.
“Good black and white photography is not about the removal of color!”
– Rob Sheppard
Rob Sheppard is a famous nature photographer and videographer and he works for a well-known outdoor photographer magazine as an editor. He also wrote and published over 40 books.
23.
“Color is everything, black and white are more.”
– Dominic Rouse
Dominic Rouse is an English photographer and visual artist and his work include photojournalism, advertising, commercial, and fine art photography. He is an early practitioner of digital photography.
22.
“Our lives at times seem a study in contrast… love & hate, birth & death, right & wrong… everything seen in absolutes of black & white. Too often we are not aware that it is the shades of grey that add depth & meaning to the starkness of those extremes.”
– Ansel Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984)
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist and he was known for his black-and-white images of the American West. Also, He found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which focused on sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He published many Photographic books, such as
The print: contact printing and enlarging, Camera and lens: the creative approach: studio, laboratory, and operation.
21.
“For black and white landscapes I concentrate on the graphic elements of a scene, and the nature of the environment, whether it is stormy or tranquil.”
– Antonia Deutsch
Antonia Deutsch started her career in advertisement photography. After a while, she found a love for landscapes and nature. She won many awards and recognitions for his excellent work.
20.
“One very important difference between color and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in color you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty… absolute certainty.”
– Paul Outerbridge (August 15, 1896 – October 17, 1958)
Paul Outerbridge, Jr. was a famous American photographer and he is known for his early use and experiments in color photography. He also was a fashion and commercial photographer and started to teach color photography in early days. Outerbridge is a creator of erotic nude photographs, but these photos are not be exhibited in his lifetime.
19.
“Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies’ playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.”
– Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975)
Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist, and his best known for his work- Farm Security Administration (FSA) showing the effects and life of the Great Depression. His goal is to create some pictures that are “literate, authoritative, transcendent”.
18.
“I think every subject deserves to be treated as just what they are, an individual. It’s quite often I will think ‘this is going to look great in black and white’ though. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a black and white photograph and thought ‘that would look great in color’.”
– Dean Sherwood
Dean Sherwood is a London-based photographer and is good at portrait, editorial, and advertisement photography. He learned photography at the age of 11.
17.
“In the history of photography, we have many masterpieces in terms of black and white books. You have Bresson’s ‘Decisive Moment,’ Frank’s ‘The Americans’… many masterpieces. But there is nothing to this caliber in color. Well, I think I’ll waltz with my muse and hope that I might be able to produce something on this order in color.”
– Ralph Gibson（born January 16, 1939, ）
Ralph Gibson is an American art photographer and he is well-known for his photographic books. When it comes to his photos, there are many fragments with erotic and mysterious undertones, building narrative meaning through contextualization and surreal juxtaposition.
16.
“Which is probably the reason why I work exclusively in black and white… to highlight that contrast.”
– Leonard Nimoy (March 26, 1931 – February 27, 2015)
Leonard Simon Nimoy was a talented person and he was an American actor, author, director, singer, songwriter, and photographer who won international fame for playing Spock in the Star Trek franchise for almost 50 years. During his childhood, he loved photography and for the rest of his life, he had a camera he had rebuilt at the age of 13. His photography work has been exhibited at the R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.
15.
“In the ’70s, in Britain, if you were going to do serious photography, you were obliged to work in black-and-white. The color was the palette of commercial photography and snapshot photography.”
– Martin Parr (born 23 May 1952)
Martin Parr CBE is a based-UK documentary photographer, photojournalist as well as photobook collector. He is famous for his photographic projects that use an intimate, satirical, and anthropological look at aspects of modern life. Particularly, his images show the social classes of England and the wealth of the Western world.
14.
“There are some locations I go to and they scream black and white to me because of the ambience. For me, great black and white images fall into two categories: very dramatic with stormy skies and bold compositions and at the other end of the spectrum a calm and minimalist composition.”
– Helen Rushton
13.
“A natural self-limitation in photography is to leave out the color and present the world in black and white.”
– Harold Davis (born 1953)
Harold Davis (born 1953) is an American photographer and author. Harold Davis is the first person for pioneering an HDR workflow from capture to print, covering hand processing that leads to the imagery that looks natural in addition to portraying the extraordinary detail possible with an extended tonal range.
12.
“Black and white finds a new strength in unlikely subjects, taking away the distractions of colour and emphasising form, texture and shape.”
– David Prakel
11.
“What I love about Black & White photographs is that they’re more like reading the book than seeing the movie”
– Jennifer Price
10.
“Maybe black and white is the best medium for landscapes, I don’t know.”
– Fay Godwin (17 February 1931 – 27 May 2005)
Fay Godwin was a British photographer, best known for her black-and-white landscapes of the British countryside and coast. She won an honorary fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 1990 and had a major retrospective at the Barbican Centre in London in 2001.
9.
“While the absence of color may contribute to our appreciation, at the same time it is important to assert that black and white is not photography minus color. Not at all. It’s much more subtle than turning down the color saturation on your television.”
– John Beardsworth
8.
“Architectural photography allows me to tame cities of iron and concrete and find a ‘charm’ within them. With my studio photography shooting plants and flowers, I can keep some affiliation with nature. These two themes often recur in my work and complement each other: the cold, sharp aesthetics and straight lines of architecture are opposed by the delicacy, curves, sensitivity and poetry of nature. These themes have influenced me to switch to the world of black and white to accentuate this darker but more poetic theme.”
– Guy Gagnon
7.
The special factor about black and white photography is that it doesn’t just copy the reality, but it represents it with its own language.”
– Gian Marco Marano
6.
I enjoy using black and white when creating fashion images and portraits as it tends to isolate the model. When shooting black and white, it makes you think differently. Your mindset has to change from colour and you have to think in monochrome.”
– James Nader
5.
“My experience of learning in the darkroom with the black-and-white film had limitations that were helpful. There were fewer choices. When digital came along, I didn’t jump into it. But it was obvious that this is what was going to be. If you do this for a long time, everything changes.”
– Annie Leibovitz（born October 2, 1949, ）
Anna-Lou Leibovitz is an American portrait photographer and she often takes many photos of celebrities, which often feature subjects in intimate settings and poses. Her Polaroid photo of John Lennon and Yoko Ono is taken five hours before Lennon’s murder and it is treated as one of Rolling Stone magazine’s most famous cover photographs.
4.
“While colour photography gets ever closer to reproducing a ‘real image’, comparable to that witnessed by the eye, mono provides a level of abstraction that can evoke a sense of fantasy, dream or escape.”
– Tim Savage
3.
“The black and white photographer is a musician, transposing notes on the fly, visualizing a final print from the world of color.”
– Ted Dillard
2.
“I prefer black and white and portrait photography. I like old, you know, interesting faces, so I think black and white brings out the contrast.”
– Brooklyn Beckham
- “Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.”
– Samuel Fuller
