by John Harvey
Long after the arrival of colour photography, black-and-white continues in notable strength. The recent use of flash with monochrome has found a new way of making the real surreal. In Mårten Lange’s Anomalies of 2009, the steep contrast of the flash makes the sky outside black as interstellar space (illus. 102). But for a favourite example of photographer’s black in the age of colour I shall cite a picture by the distinguished Greek photographer Aris Georgiou. I have it on my wall, in a large print from the photographer’s hand, titled Montpellier, 1976 (illus. 103). I am teased by the strangeness of the building, and by the oddly slanted wall with the low door beside it, which again is odd with the narrow, scalloped windows along its top. The picture draws me with a double pull, both upstairs to a window dissolving in light and downstairs towards the not-shut door, which half opens on a bright-lit space. What people belong here? I am drawn to the door as by a half-open book, and approaching the stairs seems like starting a story. This could be a still from a black-and-white film, because chiaroscuro easily says to us, ‘narrative’. For me this picture has intrigue, which is made by its lights and deep, enclosing blacks.
It is a real question what is gained and what lost in moving between colour and black-and-white. Michel Pastoureau criticizes contemporary culture for its readiness to believe that a picture may say more in black-and-white than in colour. And in his short book Chromophobia (2001) David Batchelor traces humanity’s love–hate relationship with colour back to biblical times. The love of colour has been condemned for its association with sensuousness, with crimson sinfulness, with aesthetic amoralism, with homosexuality. The artist Bridget Riley has written an eloquent essay on the kind of beauty achieved in Western oil painting, where the transparency of the paint allows innumerable hues to cooperate in elaborate chords of colour. In the course of her discussion Riley distinguishes two kinds of black: the black of chiaroscuro, where Caravaggio and his successors used black in their shadows to dim and cancel colour; and the black of the colourists – of Rubens, Velázquez, Delacroix – whose black acts positively as a colour in its play with the reds and blues and golds.17
The question remains: what is the fundamental difference between the monochrome and the coloured image? At a recent exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, with their many lustrous blacks beside and within bodies, I have walked back and forth between the colour and the monochrome versions of his large, dramatic photos of orchids. I find the comparison hard to focus clearly because the difference between the modes seems in some way radical. If pressed, I might say that the monochrome image seems to want to tell me something, while the colour seems there to be enjoyed. Perhaps I misdescribe the difference, but still I wonder if that difference could relate to the different ways in which our sight has evolved.
102 Mårten Lange, photograph from Anomalies, 2009.
103 Aris Georgiou, Montpellier, 1976, photograph.
Our vision of black-and-white involves both the ‘cone’ and the ‘rod’ cells in the retina; and, as noted earlier, both forms of cell emit an electrical signal on seeing light and whiteness and then again on seeing black and darkness. There is no question why they should signal light, since light lets us know where we are in the world. But why should they flag up dark and blackness? It seems it was important, at the beginning of evolution, for organisms to know where the dark places were – since they might offer safety or hide a predator. Our tonal vision has much to do with danger and safety – as it still does on a dark night or when one is watching a thriller (which will use exaggerated chiaroscuro). These features may have helped monochrome vision to be associated with statement and story, with hope and fear. A young contemporary painter of black (and white) canvases, Wilhelm Sasnal, has said, ‘black is the colour when you’re thinking of a means for telling stories and constructing narratives’.18
At this early stage of vision, colour discrimination was limited. And most mammals, through their long history, have seen only two colours, yellow and violet; a dog sees the world in warm yellows, cold purples. It is three-colour vision that gives us the rainbow – crimson, gold, turquoise, aquamarine. It evolved in our ancestor the monkey – separately in America and in Eurasia – seemingly so our forefathers could see which fruit were ripe, turning to yellow and red amid green leaves. Since then our colour sense has acquired great subtlety, which we exercise immediately when we see a beautiful dress, or an oil painting by Titian. But still we call colours ‘delicious’: they gives us a pleasure like the pleasure of taste. We might say colour feeds the soul, not the stomach. But still colour feeds, while black-and-white signifies.
I simplify, of course. Colours can have meanings, and black-and-white has beauty. But still the priorities of colour and monochrome vision are different. I may be swayed to this reading by the dominance of black-and-white in our communication media and by the long history of black ink on white paper (or vellum, or papyrus). But that history, on the other hand, may – must – be influenced by the character of monochrome vision. News photos will have a strong chiaroscuro, since they are importantly informative, while our colour vision waits for the fashion or the sports pages.
Reverting to the essay by Bridget Riley, one might say that actually there are not two, but three, blacks: there is black the strong colour, which dances with other colours; and black the shadow, which smothers colour; and also black the semantic colour, the colour of outlines, of letters and words, the colour that divides and also connects. In colour separations for colour printing, the black plate is called the ‘key’.
The question of monochrome versus polychrome images arises again in film. On celluloid, the switch between colour and black-and-white has been worked many times since Eisenstein abruptly jumped into colour stock for a late reel in Part II of Ivan the Terrible (1958) Often the switch seems simple and arbitrary, as when ‘the present’ is shot in colour, and ‘the past’ in black-and-white. But some filmmakers have played this transition with a memorable sensitivity.
Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia, of 1983, ends with two long takes. In the first, a Russian who has been self-exiled in Italy for many years pays homage to a friend who has recently died. He visits a spa which his friend had liked and decides to carry a lighted candle from one end of the drained pool to the other. The scene is in subdued brown-greys, while the candle flame flickers with a pure, bright yellow. Very slowly the camera approaches the man, who retraces his steps when the candle twice blows out, and a kind of marriage develops between spectator, camera and protagonist. At last the candle is set on the stone, then we hear a gasp and – in a brief shot – see an onlooker hurry over. We wonder, has the protagonist collapsed – or died?
Then, in monochrome, we see the same man sitting at the edge of a pool beside a resting Alsatian dog. As the camera tracks back we see their reflections in the water and then, behind them, a small dacha or country home set against dark woodland. But by now we are puzzled by the reflection in the water of tall chimneys of shadow, which prove, as the camera continues to withdraw, to be the reflections of the arches in a ruined church. We have visited this church, which is in Italy, earlier in the film, but now – a clear impossibility – the protagonist, his dog, the pool, house and woodland are all contained within the ruins. The camera has halted, it begins to snow, and we see the snow settle on house-roof and hillside. The snow pauses, then resumes, while the soundtrack continues its remote, quiet noise of whistlings, dog-howls, a woman’s song. So the film ends, with a slow-revealed metaphor for – what? The consecration of a lost, remembered world – of a death, a life, with (or without) a faith also lost . . .
One asks then what difference is made by the presence, or the absence, of colour. Would the change be significant if the first take was in monochrome and the second in colour? The candle shot would not lose its incremental suspense if shot in black-and-white – though the yellow of the candle flame is a precious touch of colour. It would be odd, though, if the candle had been in monochrome, to switch to colour for the world in
a church, which might then seem too softly nostalgic, when its primary reference is to a yearning for lost things in the shadow of death. The question is a delicate one, but one might claim – contrary perhaps to the implications of Bridget Riley and David Batchelor – that there is no loss in art, suggestiveness, or in beauty either, in Nostalgia’s closing move from colour to black-and-white: in which the man’s pullover, the windows, the tree-trunks and foliage, all have the emphasis of black.
BLACK, IN THE aesthetic domain, has kept its seriousness. It has, however, lost much of its association with religious faith, and also with evil that is in some way supernatural. One might ask where the black of the Devil has gone – the colour of witchcraft and sinister magic. The answer seems to be into fiction: fiction, that is, that cannot be called realist. Dramatic and threatening blacks thrive in popular fantasy literature today, and have done so since the early nineteenth century, when it became regular practice for fictitious events to be visualized continuously. In the tales of Poe, of the later 1830s and the ’40s, the word ‘black’ had been an excitant, especially when the writer aimed to give water a macabre character. In Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1881–3) the action had begun in Black Hill Cove with the menacing arrival of the mystery seaman Black Dog, together with Blind Pugh, who dispensed the death-giving ‘BLACK SPOT’. In the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) the word was used more freely and figuratively. The action began on ‘a black winter morning’, Dr Jekyll laboured under a ‘blackness of distress’, and during his transformation Jekkyll/Hyde’s face ‘became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter’. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the Count, on his first appearance, was ‘clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere’.19
There was a salient use of black in the twentieth century, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings of 1954–5. On Middle Earth the bad wear black mainly, it seems, to show they are bad. Black Riders sniff in the hobbits’ tracks, or tower over others in enveloping black hoods; they are a sort of living dead and among themselves they speak ‘the Black Speech’, which sounds, to judge from its ‘k’s, hard ‘g’s and ‘zgh’ noises, repulsively catarrhal. They come from the evil land of Mordor, which has a Black Gate while its armies wear black livery. The name ‘Mordor’ is said to mean, in Tolkien’s invented language, ‘Black Land’. It would have the same meaning in the Romance languages, picking up on ‘moor’, ‘blackamoor’ and ‘Mauretania’, also calling to mind the Latin mors (death) and mordere (to bite, harm, sting), as well as assonating with ‘murder’. The primordial dark power Morgoth wears black armour and carries a vast, plain, dead-black shield. Mordor’s own Dark Lord, Sauron, is also known as the Black Hand and is hideous and terrifying in his form, which we hear, at the Council of Elrond, ‘was black and yet burned like fire’. I have wondered whether one reason why the film company restricted him to a blazing eye was because in Tolkien he is black-skinned and could give offence racially (no one seems troubled, in the world of film fantasy, by a lord of many rings with no fingers to put them on).
I am sorry if I seem to mock this work, because I was infatuated when I discovered it, as a twelve-year-old, in the mid-1950s. It may have contributed to my interest in black, and I have noticed the use of Tolkienian fantasy-evil-black in its innumerable derivatives. Tolkien also demonstrates that our new, fearful blacks are rooted in the ‘real’ blacks of the Devil, hell and demons. For Tolkien was a medievalist who had studied Greek and Latin at school and university. His evil land of Mordor, which is all darkness, fire and blackness, with iron gates and iron towers, draws both on the medieval Christian hell – a black, blazing landscape peopled by monsters and black devils – and also on the preceding classical Hades, which again had black fires and red fires – and rivers of fire – and giant gates and towers of iron, plus its own dark lord, ‘the Black One’, Hades or Pluto, who sat on a throne attended by hooded Deaths. One difference in the picture is that Hades had beside him his permanently young, beautiful bride Queen Persephone, the spirit of spring – but she could not survive into the Christian Hell and should not be looked for in Middle Earth. Sauron, unlike Hades – and unlike Satan – is single and sexless.
While evil black recurs in post-Tolkien prose fantasies by Stephen Donaldson and others, it is most apparent in film: where the fact that in the real world black is stylish means that both sides may wear black. An evil lord will likely wear black but so may his young, dragon-riding opponents. Or, in a high-tech fantasy such as The Matrix, the hostile living programs may wear black glasses with black business-suits, while the youthful resistance figures wear shiny, ankle-length black coats (over black or purple-black outfits). Keanu Reeves as ‘Neo’ looks at times like a young Jesuit in his button-up black cassock, but he flies like Superman – though black like Batman – when living inside the supercomputer’s software.
Batman, through his many incarnations since the comic book of 1939, is the ultimate superhero in black. His original catsuit was grey, worn with a blue hooded cape, trunks and boots, but from the start – from the dramatic first drawing – the front part of his mask was often shaded jet-black, as were the scalloped folds of his cape. Often Batman’s accessories were more black than blue, and since 1990, in both comic books and films, his cape, hood and mask have been black while his trunks and boots are often scarcely distinguishable from his deep-charcoal body armour. From the earliest depictions, and more so recently, his appearance hints at the demonic. The bat-mask has slit eyes, a dagger nose and pointed ears like horns; the black cape spreads wide like a demon’s pterodactyl wings. Batman offers the special thrill of resembling the Devil in the cause of good while being still, in secret, a millionaire with a conscience. His faithful butler Alfred wears the black-and-white of service, while one of his enemies, the Penguin, is the bad sort of millionaire and wears a black top hat with (in the comic books as in the film) a black tail-coat. Batman is a masked crusader – like the Lone Ranger, and even more like Zorro, who also wore black – but is nearer than either both to the supernatural world and to Wall Street. His black is associated at once with good and with bad money, counted by the million. His leading woman opponent is a cat – a black cat.
Batman shows that if demonic black has passed from true fear into fantasy, it can with a further twist become the style of sympathetic figures – as in those genres of confused fantasizing where we take sides with one or more youthful vampires, witches, werewolves or demons, now seen as a hard-done-by alien race, tending like goths to white faces and black gear, which often glistens like PVC. Zombies, on the other hand, the living dead, wear miscellaneous old clothes – which are liable however to look dark-to-black, since zombies are short on laundering. In these genres fear and style meet, playing half-forbidden games with fetish-black and the sexualization of black synthetics.
There are other dimensions also. The very constancy of young-vampire movies suggests they are the fantasy-deformation of a persistent social sore. The wound in question could be said to be drug use, since the vampire is the ultimate addictive personality, substance-determined, with impaired affect. In his or her trendy death-black outfit the youthful blood-addict both glamorizes and demonizes the half-life of dependency. Werewolves and zombies, too, may be seen as ‘altered state’ versions of people. But nor are drugs the whole story, for what vampires and zombies have in common is that they are in different ways dead. In other words, fantasy black and evil black are related also to black’s ancient role as the colour of death. There may be a shrewd anxiety management going on in this profitable field of production in which, together with other excitements, the fear of death, the fascination with death and the eroticization of death are combined in mass youth entertainment.
THE ASSOCIATION IN fantasy of black with evil is the light side of the profound link that has always been felt between blackness and the most terrible events – also the most terrible acts – which human beings may suffer or do. The Black Death w
as not called black only because it caused necrosis of the extremities, but because it was – or because it was thought to be – the most evil epidemic of all time. More lightly, ‘black’ is applied to weekdays on which financial disasters occur, as in ‘Black Monday’ or ‘Black Wednesday’. But especially the word ‘black’ is used of those events where the motive is evil. Confronted with genocide, with sadistic killing or mutilation, we spontaneously call up the colour-word ‘black’ because the evil is extreme, like a total loss of light – as though forgiveness, here, would itself be a crime. The use of ‘black’ in such a context is entirely metaphorical, though the imagery of light and dark has been intertwined for so long with our sense of good and bad that ‘black’, said of wickedness, feels like the grammatical superlative of ‘bad’ (‘blacker’ and ‘blackest’ are no stronger).
To decide which human acts have been the blackest of all is hardly a pleasant task – and inevitably, and fortunately, the instances that most of us bring to mind will be remote from us, newsreel things, things we have heard reported. I think of a black-and-white shot of countless white, naked, horribly emaciated bodies piled across each other in a pit for burial in a Nazi camp; a photograph of a girl in Sierra Leone holding up her bandaged stumps because ‘fighters’ have cut her hands off to score a racial-political point; and Fred West – for weeks – torturing young girls trapped in his cellar, while they knew all the time that he would kill them in the end. In England one would think of the Moors Murders also, but every country has (if one looks back) overflowing files of black acts. The use of ‘black’ for atrocities can be a cliché, but it is not for no reason that ‘clichés’ are repeated. Some ‘clichés’ rightly endure forever, and the use of ‘black’ for utter wickedness is one such.
