That’s a question that arises (along with a huge spike in traffic to this website) every time Vancouver is Awesome re-shares their story on my Eighties Vancouver work to Facebook. Some wag complains that colour film was available at the time.

So why did I choose to load my cameras with monochrome film when I made this body of work? After all, I shot colour film — most often (35mm) Kodachrome — during the same period.

The film I chose to record those urban scenes as Vancouver entered an era of rapid development and destruction rested less on adherence to historical photographic processes than it did to using techniques I’d mastered and through which I could best express the subtleties, tones, and the emotions, if you will, of those landscapes.

Cost

Quite simply, I couldn’t afford colour film and processing for all my work. As I’ve described in stories from the Eighties Vancouver category, I sometimes raided film stock reserved for paying jobs to pursue the project, leaving me short on materials.

Aesthetics

I saw urban scenes in shades of grey, possibly due to growing up in England among a monotony of brick buildings, and influence of black and white photographs of the day. I was emotionally moved, sometimes to tears, by black and white prints I’d seen at exhibitions, beginning in the early ’80s.

Technical Control

The main reason for my choice of medium for these photographs arose from the desire to personally conduct every aspect of the photographic process. When I shot a roll of Kodachrome colour transparency film, off it went to Kodak’s specialty lab where it was subjected to the complex “K-14” process. On return, I had the choice of having prints made by three different methods: via a reversal “interneg” made from the Kodachrome positive, from which a chromogenic “C-print” could then be made, or by direct processes using Cibachrome or R-prints.

Note that I said “having prints made,” because I had neither the facilities or expertise to produce such prints. The best I could do was rely on darkroom technicians at commercial labs to interpret my instructions. 

Black and white was another matter.

I began my apprenticeship in black and white photography in my father’s attic darkroom, when I was tall enough to rock the chemical trays, enthralled by the magical appearance of the silver image on blank paper. 

Twenty-five years later, I had turned my fascination into a hobby, then part-time trade. My colour work appeared on the covers of magazines and catalogues. Pre-digital, those were prepared by printers using the “colour separation” method. I most often shot black and white for inside pages — a decision driven by budgetary considerations in printing. Mountain Equipment Co-op’s catalogue as an example.

The MEC cover work came from climbing expeditions, where I used colour film almost exclusively. For inside pages, I learned to make low contrast monochrome prints best suited to reproduction by the black and white halftone process.

I was a serious student of Ansel Adams’ Zone System.

I had at my disposal the materials, darkroom hardware, and the expertise to fully control and express my vision in black and white. I was familiar with a wide variety of panchromatic black and white films, film developers, silver gelatin printing papers, paper developers and toners that comprised my “pallette,” if you will. Through years of experimentation, I could confidently predict the effects of combining these formulas and materials in the darkroom.

With these materials and skills I was well prepared to interpret my ideas.

Archival permanence

At the time I made the Eighties Vancouver photographs, I was fully aware that (most) colour processes were destined to fade away in relatively short order. Not that everyone might abandon colour photography, but that the everyday components of colour photography — negative film and prints — were inherently unstable. 

Without turning this post into a treatise on archival properties (that may be a topic for another day) suffice to say that chromogenic machine prints, used for the production of colour photographs at drugstores (then and now), have a limited lifespan. How many of your family heirlooms from the ‘70s are a blurry green mess? (Then again, at least family snapshots in the past made their way to scrapbooks rather than existing as even less permanent pixels on a cellphone or the Web.)

Cibachromes, now discontinued like Kodachrome film, had better permanence, as did the equally complex, not to mention rare, carbon printing process. Hand-colouring black and white prints, which I adopted for a while, using Windsor & Newton oils, might also be expected to outlast C-prints.

Today, the most popular reproduction methods for “art prints” come down to inkjet pigment printing and the aforementioned chromogenic (C-print) print process, which today is exposed to a digital “negative” before wet development. Of the two, pigment printing wins the permanence competition hands down for reasons mentioned above. Aesthetic considerations aside (beauty is in the eye of the beholder), the dyes used in chromogenic materials simply don’t last as long as pigments, as accelerated aging tests have established.

Strangely, the C-print has gained wide acceptance with some galleries and dealers, who might, for instance, sell a Cindy Sherman photo, rendered on chromogenic paper, for nearly $4 million. Of course, a version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, rendered on cardboard with crayon will fetch a few dollars as well. $119,922,600, to be precise.

Compared to 2 or 3 C-Print materials, a wide variety of papers are available for inkjet printing. The best are acid-free rag. Combined with pigment inks, they promise many years of stability.

The extraordinary colour photographs of veteran Vancouver photographer Fred Herzog, whose vintage Vancouver work we are thankful he rendered on (stable) Kodachrome film, are now reproduced via inkjet with pigment inks.

Still today, black and white (pigment) prints can be expected to outlast their colour counterparts. It is well established that B&W prints, produced via, let’s say, Epson’s “Advanced Black & White” settings (which I most often use to produce my monochrome work), using 3 dedicated inks — black, light black, light light black — will far outlast colour prints made with the same printer — around 100-years for colour, up to 400-years for B&W, assuming proper care. The fine gradation of tones produced by those multiple inks and micro-nozzle print heads reproduce the widest dynamic range an image can throw at them, in the here and now.

Purebred prints

When you buy a print from me (colour or B&W), you can rest assured that it was created, from the camera to the final print, by my hands, according to the desired result. In relation to film-based images like the ‘80s Vancouver collection, that includes all the analogue processes associated with film development.

Dealers consider pedigree when appraising photographic prints — an original print made by Ansel Adams will fetch a great deal more at auction than an edition produced by his assistant in later years.

All this assumes that you value physical photographs over the inferior and mercurial images seen on this site, Facebook, Instagram and other online galleries, facsimiles that bear only superficial resemblance to the prints I make in my studio.

Since making the switch to digital photography, I’ve endeavoured to acquire digital printing skills to match those I once applied in the wet darkroom. Sometimes the resulting prints are visually superior to their silver emulsion predecessors.

When I’m “conducting” modern interpretations of original monochrome negatives, using scanner and computer applications, it never occurs to me to question whether they might be better had I recorded them in colour.

And I really don’t appreciate it when someone colourizes my black and white work and posts the resulting abomination to some Facebook nostalgia group.