Morning Trinket.
Do people only still make black and white photographs to seem cool and sophisticated? The answer’s a little complicated. Knowing why you’d prefer a picture in black and white means you’ve spent a little time thinking about photography - which makes you a more ‘sophisticated’ appreciator of photographs. So then, in a sense, yes. But I can give you that ‘sophistication’ in not many words: Eliminating colour makes you more conscious of form, light and shadow, and detail. So, like any abstraction, it shows you things that that the full set of information may conceal. It helps you see the trees for the wood.
Obviously this doesn’t make every black and white photograph interesting. There are billions of boring black and white photographs out there. This one mostly is interesting only to me. But great black and white photographs would not have the same power if the colour was restored.
In a book I read many years ago by LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, he said that colour should only be preferred when colour is the subject of the photograph. A black and white picture of the Rio Carnival is rarely going to be more interesting than a colour one. The main characteristic of photography in general is its ability to easily render extreme detail in a way that only the most labour-intensive manual processes (like etching for example) can deliver.
Colour isn’t special. Lush colour has been a staple of painting and printing since long before photography. So, in a photograph where colour is not the main attraction, colour can distract you from the details that photography delivers near-uniquely. So many people who enjoy taking pictures (and you don’t have to be a gifted artist to enjoy this) prefer black and white as the norm for representing scenes and a lot of the time leave colour for when the photograph is all about the colour. Bonus fact: it’s an entirely losing strategy for Instagram engagement!