I don’t work achromatically (AKA greyscale or black-and-white) much. Part of this is that people seem to respond more to my color work.

Starting out, I thought this was a flaw. How many photographers work in black-and-white, celebrating light as the fundamental element of photographic compositions? Color can be a noisy, gaudy distraction to a work with weak value contrast.

But, I keep coming back to the following images:

Broadcast in black-and-white, The Addams Family (1964) has a morbid, dark, and gothic aesthetic to it. But, the original set, is this beautiful explosion of color. It still reads as eccentric and busy with so many things for the eye to land on.

I doubt the fictional clan would be perceived any less strange by their neighbors in a pink rather than grey living room.

Charles “Chas” Addams, the original cartoonist, worked mostly in black ink on his single panel comics because it was going to printed in greyscale newspapers. Printing collections of his work, even he employed color for his fictional family.

Contemporary æsthetics declare dark, morbid, and gothic should be dominated by blacks and greys. Yet, the movements that influenced them have brilliant, saturated colors.

The Romantic and Victorian Eras had brilliant new (and sometimes deadly colors) like aniline purple and arsenic greens.

Earlier gothic architecture features stained glass, creating a multicolor dreamscape, such as at Sainte-Chappele.

There’s this strange idea of imagining the past in shades of grey and sepia. Transposing the limits of photographic technology onto the subjects.

… I don’t dislike black-and-white photography. I still merrily watch silent-era films. I even watch reruns of The Addams Family from time-to-time.

But, I love color. Minimalism, modernism, and a goal of always “matching” necessitating everything be in neutral colors: or, “millennial gray,” as the meme puts it.

In a space of neutrals, saturated colors feels more rebellious and counter to the zeitgeist.