The serious business of photography

It's a running joke in our house that I'm obsessed with covering the living room walls with depressing black-and-white photo prints. (Let's just say that's an exaggeration - there's a black-and-white Robin Weaver print and a black-and-white Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen poster, admittedly, but the Peter Mitchell print is in colour, albeit very muted.)

Part of the joke is that black-and-white photography is perceived by many (both inside this house and beyond) as self-consciously "arty", presenting itself as being somehow more serious and significant than colour.

In a recent post on The United Nations Of Photography, Grant Scott explained that this is a hangover from the early days of photography, when the artform was initially regarded as merely "a mechanical recording medium". In the face of scoffs and sneers, the first photographers were desperate for their work to be taken seriously and accorded the kind of respect given to painting - and so they actively sought to establish and champion its artistic credentials.

Working in black and white was, for many decades, a matter of necessity rather than choice. As Scott observed, "[c]olour photography only became practical, cheap and widely available in the mid-1950s". At that point, the scoffs and sneers returned, but this time from old-school photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who rubbished the idea that serious work could possibly be produced in colour.

And yet the likes of Stephen Shore, William Eggleston and Martin Parr set about proving otherwise. As intimated in Lee Shulman's documentary, Parr's acceptance into Magnum - controversial though it was - was a triumph on a personal level but also signified a broader victory over artistic snobbery, in terms of preferred medium as well as subject matter.

The artistic decision over whether to choose black and white or colour is weighted with substantial cultural and historical baggage that might sway things one way or the other - but ultimately, as Scott emphasised, neither medium is inherently superior to the other.