In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope sent back to astronomers at the
University of Arizona a series of vivid colour images of the Eagle Nebula,
a dense formation of interstellar gas and dust the likes of which cradle
newborn stars. As evidence that our perceptual universe, in every sense of
the word, is defined by the representational powers of colour technology,
the Hubble's “cosmic close-ups” are a clear case in point. Colour has
become a standard representational form and hence the visual form. If so,
what can be said of the recent popularity and proliferation of the black-and-white image?
No self-respecting café-bar or discriminating home, it seems, can now
do without a black and white print on the wall. Commercial photography
and certain forms of advertising have found a new niche in black and
white, and even sepia is staging a come-back. The popularity of the black-and-white image cannot be divorced from the commercial culture in
which it circulates; it is a “look” and a marker of taste. Monochrome is
a stylistic trend but a revealing one, especially if one considers the
growing preoccupation in America with heritage and memory. Both
Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes give black and white a status of
authenticity judged in relation to past time “properly” captured. For
Sontag, monochrome gives an image a sense of age, historical distance,
and aura. She writes, “the cold intimacy of color seems to seal off the
photograph from patina.” Likewise, Barthes comments on the artifice of
colour, how it is a “coating applied later on to the original truth of black
and white.” For both critics, monochrome is an aesthetic of the authentic
figured around a basic quality of pastness.