At the birth of photography, all images were black and white.  For many experimenters, however, colour reproduction became the ‘holy grail’, and within little more than a decade of the announcement of Daguerre’s invention there were claims being made of photographers successfully making coloured images.  It was to be almost a century, however, before the first commercial processes were introduced: in the late 1930s, Kodak introduced ‘Kodachrome’, and Agfa gave us ‘Agfacolor Neu’. 

After many decades of experimenting and perfecting the colour process, we have now arrived at a point where, in fact, ALL of our images are made in colour. [1]  It may seem strange, then, that we should even be thinking about black+white as a viable means of expression.

There is, however, something distinctly different about seeing the world in shades of grey.

[1] There are a couple of caveats to this.  Firstly, there are many photographers (myself included) who still use film—and even stranger processes—to make images, and many of those are made in B+W.  Also, there is at least one digital camera—the Leica M-Monochrome—which is made to capture only black and white images.