This doesn't exactly have a picture to go with it. It's more of a rambling. I have noticed that there have been very few color photographs that use color in the same way that black and white photographs have. This is true in film and video as well as photography.
I think this started as a topic of mine when I saw the movie "Under the Volcano" by John Huston. I was impressed by that film, not only for Albert Finney's fantastic portrayal of the alcoholic expat, but also how color was used to tell the story rather than to just show it. I think that in large part, that is the distinction. The difference between telling a story and showing a story. The abstraction of black and white automatically casts the scene as being in a reductivist locale of narrative. It requires an immediate, and obvious mediation step to decode the form into meaning. Color seems to require less mediation and therefor appears more as an innocent signifier, closer to the signified.
Anyway - maybe there's something unique to our relationship with black and white images, but I'm very interested in exploring color images to see if there's some aspect of them that can function to the same ends as black and white. What is the problem set?
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