A photographic tale

The City Without Colours

Notes from Artef Fierel

The following morning, Artef Fierel rose before dawn.

This time, he was not going out in search of just any photograph. He was not interested in façades lit by the sun, colourful shop signs, the sudden red of a car speeding down the avenue, or that blade of light capable of framing contrasts in striking geometries.

He wanted to make a single photograph.

A black-and-white photograph.

He picked up the small two-megapixel camera, checked the battery, and slipped his notebook into his jacket pocket. Before closing the door, he wrote a question at the top of a blank page:

“Why do we love black and white so much when the world appears to us in colour?”

He stepped outside, carrying that question with him.

The city streets were still wet. It had rained during the night, and the streetlamps were reflected on the asphalt like elongated moons. The lowered shutters bore rust, scratches, and old writing; above the rooftops, meanwhile, the sky was slowly brightening into the pastel hue that always cheered him.

Artef set the camera to display its images directly in monochrome. He knew that the sensor would continue to record light through a mosaic of tiny red, green, and blue filters, while the camera’s processor converted those signals into shades of grey; but he wanted to observe a world already freed from colour.

He looked at the screen.

The city he knew had disappeared.

The bar on the corner was no longer yellow. The bus waiting at the terminus was no longer blue. The traffic light possessed neither red nor green. Everything had become a different quantity of light.

Artef understood that a black-and-white photograph did not portray a world without colours. It portrayed a world in which every colour had been translated into a value of luminance.

Red, green, and blue did not truly disappear: they changed language.

They became greys.

Some pale, some deep, others almost indistinguishable from one another.

He stopped before a wall covered in posters. To the naked eye, red lettering stood out boldly against a green background. On the screen, however, with the conversion chosen by the camera, the two colours took on almost the same shade of grey and blurred into one another.

Artef smiled.

The camera had just reminded him that colour and luminance are not the same thing.

Visible light is only a small part of the immense electromagnetic spectrum. Different spectral compositions of light stimulate our visual system in different ways. Surfaces absorb some wavelengths and reflect others. An apple does not keep redness inside itself like a secret substance: under suitable illumination, it reflects proportionally more radiation in the regions of the spectrum that our brains interpret as red.

In complete darkness, even the reddest apple no longer appears red: it simply cannot be seen.

Without light, colour falls silent.

And without an eye and a brain capable of interpreting it, perhaps colour, as we know it, does not exist at all.

Artef wrote:

“Things do not have an absolute colour. They have a way of responding to light.”

He resumed his walk.

The day grew brighter, and with it grew the differences between the illuminated areas and those still immersed in shadow. Artef no longer observed the façades for the colour of their plaster, but for the way they received the light. A white wall facing north could appear darker than a red wall struck directly by the sun. A black coat crossed by a beam of light could reveal more detail than a pale shirt hidden beneath a portico.

Black and white altered the hierarchy of things.

Colour said: look at me.

Light, instead, said: look at how I exist.

Passing a shop window, Artef saw his own reflection. He thought of the human eye, that small, living camera obscura in which light is refracted chiefly by the cornea, passes through the pupil — which regulates its quantity — and is focused on the retina with the help of the lens.

There lie the cones and rods.

Cones work mainly when light is plentiful and allow us to distinguish colours through three classes with broad, overlapping spectral sensitivities: S, M, and L, most sensitive respectively to short, medium, and long wavelengths. The brain compares their responses and constructs the variety of colours we perceive.

Rods, by contrast, are very sensitive to dim light, but do not enable us to distinguish colours. At dusk, cones and rods contribute to vision together; when light becomes very scarce, it is mainly the rods that guide us.

That is why, as daylight fades, the world slowly loses its palette.

It is not the night that erases colours. It is our visual system that, receiving little light, almost ceases to listen to them.

Artef thought that perhaps the fascination of black and white recalled precisely that mode of seeing dominated by forms, movement, and contrast. Monochrome spoke to the most nocturnal part of our gaze.

Near the market, he came upon a dog sniffing the base of a streetlamp. Its owner waited with the lead hanging loose.

Artef observed it.

The dog did not see the world in black and white, as many people still believed. It possessed dichromatic vision: it distinguished mainly hues associated with blue and yellow, while certain reds and greens tended to merge.

Its world was not without colour.

It was simply coloured in a different way.

Many other mammals also see a narrower range of colour than we do. Some nocturnal animals entrust much of their vision to rods and perceive chiefly brightness, outlines, and movement. In many cetaceans and pinnipeds, the loss of one class of cone makes colour discrimination very limited or perhaps absent, although the picture varies between species and some findings remain disputed. Other animals, by contrast, distinguish radiation invisible to humans: many birds and insects are also sensitive to ultraviolet light.

Artef understood that there was no single visual version of reality.

Every species inhabited its own.

A street observed by a human, a dog, a bee, and a nocturnal animal was always the same street and, at the same time, four different places.

Reality provided the light.

Eyes established its boundaries.

The brain constructed the rest.

He wrote in his notebook:

“Perhaps we do not photograph the world as it is. We photograph the way we are able to see it.”

By the time he reached the main square, Artef found the city fully awake. Café tables were being arranged beneath the porticoes. A van was unloading crates of fruit. Two children crossed the square, lugging schoolbags too large for their shoulders.

Colours were everywhere.

Oranges, red jackets, green signs, pale-blue bicycles.

And yet Artef tried to ignore them.

Not because he despised them, but because he wanted to discover what would remain once they had been relinquished.

He realised that colour often describes the present. It reveals the season, fashion, advertising, and the time of day. By removing these clues, black and white makes time less certain. A street photographed that morning might have belonged to many years before, or to a future still unknown.

Perhaps that, too, was why it was so appealing.

Colour brings us closer to the surface of things.

Black and white, sometimes, brings us closer to their duration.

He continued walking until he reached a narrow street enclosed by tall buildings. The sun entered from only one end and struck the steam rising from a grate. The paving stones, still wet, returned silver reflections. Farther ahead, an elderly woman advanced slowly, carrying a bag in her right hand.

Artef raised the camera.

But he did not take the picture.

The woman’s coat was dark green. Behind her stood a red door. In colour they were separate and recognisable; with the monochrome conversion Artef had selected, however, they would have produced shades that were too similar.

Artef changed position.

He waited until the woman reached a pale section of wall. Now her dark figure stood out perfectly against the background. The colour of her coat no longer mattered. What counted were the contrast, the outline of her body, her short stride, and the small space remaining between her feet.

Then a cloud covered the sun.

Everything became flat.

Artef lowered the camera.

Light did not merely illuminate the scene: it organised it. It decided what would emerge and what would remain concealed. Side lighting revealed the wrinkles in walls and faces; frontal lighting tended to soften them. Hard light divided the world into clear-cut areas. Diffused light created gentle transitions, offering grey an almost infinite number of shades.

Black and white, he thought, was not made of two colours.

It was made of a vast range of intervals between the presence and absence of light.

He waited.

The cloud moved on, and the sun returned to carve into the street. The woman was far away by then, but in her place a boy appeared on a bicycle. He entered the illuminated area just as a flock of pigeons rose before him.

Artef brought the camera to his eye.

For an instant, he saw only relationships: the black of the bicycle, the white of the steam, the grey wings, the slanting shadow of the buildings, the boy’s body leaning forwards.

No colour was necessary.

He pressed the shutter.

The faint sound of the shutter blended with the beating of wings.

Artef checked the screen. The photograph was not perfect. The front wheel was slightly blurred, and part of the sky had turned completely white. Yet the image possessed something the perfect photographs from his dream had lacked.

It had happened.

That boy had truly passed along that street. The pigeons had truly risen. The light had actually touched the steam, the paving stones, and the lens of his small camera.

Black and white had not taken reality away from the scene.

It had removed information to make room for attention.

Artef gazed at the photograph for a long time. Then he opened the notebook and wrote:

“Colour shows us how the world appears. Black and white asks us how we look at it.”

He closed the notebook and set off home.

Now he knew at least one answer to the morning’s question.

Black and white appeals to us because it does not imitate our vision exactly. It compels us to complete what is missing. It transforms colours into light, things into forms, and a real instant into a kind of memory. It does not necessarily simplify the world: it makes it quieter, so that we may listen to it more closely.

Before going inside, Artef turned once more towards the city.

It was full of colours.

But for the first time, he could also see everything that existed beneath them.