Why Did Ansel Adams only shoot in black-and-white?

On February 20, 1902, Ansel Adams, Olive and Charles’s lone child, was born in San Francisco. The family was once immensely wealthy, but in 1907 they lost the riches that Charles’ father, a wood baron, had amassed. Charles Adams tried for the rest of his life to get back to his old affluence but was unsuccessful.

Ansel suffered permanent disfigurement after being flung to the ground and breaking his nose during an aftershock of the great San Francisco earthquake in 1906 when he was only 4 years old. Together with his inherent timidity and this physical trait, young Ansel struggled to blend in at school.

After failing at multiple institutions, his parents removed him from public education in 1915, and Ansel began receiving tuition at home from his father and an aunt. The following year, in 1916, Ansel’s father gave him a season ticket to the “Panama-Pacific International Exposition,” a celebration of the completion of the Panama Canal. Ansel was enthralled by the international exhibitions and displays there for an entire year, visiting virtually every day, which substantially enhanced his informal education.

Why Did Ansel Adams only shoot in black-and-white?

Lee, one of our regular repeat visitors, and I (Amanda Ritchie) recently spent a few days in the photography studio together. We had a great time discussing photography in general and looking through his best shots from the safari the day before. We talked about how amazing it was for him to get to spend three days with the renowned photographer Ansel Adams. The understatement of 2016 would be to say that I was envious.

Our conversation on Ansel Adams and black-and-white photography inspired me to write this blog entry. One of the great masters, Ansel Adams is best renowned for his timeless black and white photographs of the American West. According to a professional source, Adams selected black and white for two key reasons. The first was that, in his opinion, colour may be distracting and, as a result, could prevent a photographer from realizing all of his creative potential. A well-planned and performed black-and-white image, according to Adams, can convey “a far larger sense of ‘colour’ than [he had] ever managed with colour photography.”

I express a similar perspective when visitors to the studio inquire about why I believe one of their photos may look amazing in black and white. A black-and-white shot, in my opinion, has a particular quality that a colour photo will never have. By removing the colour from the image, you can remove visual distractions and (in many cases) get to the heart of the matter or reveal a hidden moment that the colour may have been overly coloured.