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Beautiful and Inspiring Black & White Photography Quotes

Despite modern technology and equipments, many photographers and painters refuse to abandon black and white art.

Can’t blame them though, black and white photography has such a timeless aesthetic feel behind it. This is one of the reasons why people like vintage black and white photography; they seem to capture something that colored photographs don’t seem to be able to.

In today’s article, I’ve included some beautiful quotes from well-known figures, with the hope that those quotes will encourage you on your photographic journey.

20 Beautiful and Inspiring, Black and White Quotes

1. Mary Ellen Mark

“I work in color sometimes, but I guess the images I most connect to, historically speaking, are in black and white. I see more in black and white – I like the abstraction of it.”

2. Jennifer Price.

“What I love about Black & White photographs is that they’re more like reading the book than seeing the movie”

3. Andri Cauldwell

“To see in color is a delight for the eye but to see in black and white is a delight for the soul.”

4. Ted Grant

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!”

5. Paul Marciano

“When images are in black and white, they seem timeless. When you see Carrie Otis in an ad from 1989 next to an ad with Klara Wester from 2009, you don’t see a 20-year difference between the pictures.”

 

6. Jack Lowden

“Everything always looked better in black and white. Everything always looked as if it were the first time; there are always more people in a black and white photograph. It just makes it seem that there were more people at a gig, more people at a football match, than with color photography. Everything looks more exciting.”

7. Mehmet Murat Ildan

There is always something sad about the old photographs, it is because we know that people in the photos are gone forever.

8. Rob Sheppard

“Black and white photography has the potential to make any photographer a better photographer.”

9. Stefan Kanfer

“There’s something strange and powerful about black-and-white imagery.”

10. Samuel Fuller

“Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.”

11. D.S.

“In the black and white journey of life, one day… someone will come to fill colors in it.”

12. Jack Antonoff

“Black and white creates a strange dreamscape that color never can.”

13. Unknown

“Life is better in black and white.”

14. Robert Frank

“Black and white are the colors of photography. To me, they symbolize the alternatives of hope and despair to which mankind is forever subjected.”

15. Henri Mattise

“I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colors is black.”

16. Walker Evans

“Color tends to corrupt photography and absolute color corrupts it absolutely. Consider the way color film usually renders blue sky, green foliage, lipstick red, and the kiddies’ playsuit. These are four simple words which must be whispered: color photography is vulgar.”

17. Ted Grant

“When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls.”

18. Ansel Adams

“Our lives at times seem a study in contrast… love & hate, birth & death, right & wrong… everything seen in absolutes of black & white. Too often we are not aware that it is the shades of grey that add depth & meaning to the starkness of those extremes.”

19. John Beardsworth

“While the absence of color may contribute to our appreciation, at the same time it is important to assert that black and white is not photography minus color. Not at all. It’s much more subtle than turning down the color saturation on your television.”

20. Vikrmn

“The most colorful thing in the world is black and white, it contains all colors and at the same time excludes all.”