It is an act of sheer perversity on my part, to take an image as colourful as a stained glass window and remove that which makes it remarkable.
Years ago, before colour printing became the norm, art books were printed in monochrome. Works such as those by Turner, Monet, Gauguin, Cezanne, in fact almost any painter for whom colour was everything (I'm discounting Whistler) had their rich canvases reduced, and that is the right word, to banal variations on grey. It did not work. These artists did not paint thinking how nice this would look if it was in black & white or a tasteful shade of beige. They did not think of trying a slightly lighter shade of burnt umber in order to satisfy the printer of 'The Master Painters of Britain', published in 1898. This book is typical of its era; the cover is pure Art Nouveau, the reproduction, Art Reductio.
A grey scale image is obviously unnatural and yet we invest in it such a perverse pride. If the first photographic system had been full colour, would we have monochrome, sepia, duotone, all those variations? I don't know. Doubtless someone would have experimented with it, it would have been in vogue for a while, like punk music or the maxi skirt, and then it would have passed on.
Yet we keep plugging at it, searching for scenes with just the right contrast range, fiddling about in processing with shading and gamma correction. I'm as guilty as the rest of them. Why? What's driving this quest for a pale imitation of reality?
Well I think it's because the end result is so satisfying, that's why. And that's just plain weird.
3 comments:
Good point. Teachers would have used it as a way of training the eye to look for tonal balance, I suspect.
(PS: are you dry in your part of the UK?)
The movie "Pleasantville"...did you by any chance see it?
Thanks, Lee. And yes, we're right in the middle of the flooding although in a much better position than some of the surrounding towns. The worst hit, Tewkesbury, is about 15 miles away. Thankfully we were only cut off for about a day. It is going to be a long time before things get back to normal, if they ever do.
All the lesser human traits are on show - looting, theft, panic buying but also many of the nobler ones - Peter's story, which I think he's going to post, will point up some of those.
Hi Susan. Yes I have, most recently only a couple of weeks ago. It's a very good film.
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