Monochromatic (2024)

One Hue Is Not the Same as No Hue

Monochrome is routinely treated as a synonym for black and white, and the confusion costs the subject a lot of its interest. A monochromatic image is one built from a single hue, which means a cyanotype is monochromatic and intensely blue at the same time. This catalog includes a cyanotype on watercolour paper alongside thirty-three archival prints, credited between 2005 and 2023, and the cyanotype makes the point better than an argument can: nothing about restricting the palette to one colour requires that colour to be grey.

Why Monochrome Reads as Serious

The association is historical rather than logical. The founding century of the medium had no practical alternative, so the entire canon of early photography is monochrome by default, and the canon subsequently taught viewers that the absence of colour signals intention. The effect is now so entrenched that converting a weak colour photograph to black and white will make it look more considered without making it any better, which is the trap the theme sets for anyone entering it casually.

Removing Colour Is an Interpretation, Not a Reduction

Black and white is often described as stripping a scene back to essentials, but it is a larger departure from human perception than almost anything else a photographer can do. Nobody has ever seen the world in grey. The conversion requires decisions about how each hue maps to a tone, and those decisions are where the picture is actually made: a red filter darkens a sky dramatically, a green one lifts foliage, and the same negative can produce entirely different images depending on the choice. Monochrome is a translation, and translations have translators.

Infrared Records Something Nobody Can See

Infrared belongs to this territory and works differently from everything else in it. It captures wavelengths outside human vision, which is why foliage renders as white and skies go near black. The result is monochromatic but not a simplification of a visible scene; it is a picture of information that was present and inaccessible. That distinction is worth holding onto, because it separates monochrome as subtraction from monochrome as access.

Toning Is a Choice About Permanence

Sepia and selenium arrived as archival treatments before they became aesthetic signatures. Toning converts the silver in a print into a more stable compound, so the warm brown that now reads as nostalgic was originally a preservation decision. That history is a useful corrective to the assumption that a tone is only a mood. Some of the colour in an old monochrome print is there because someone wanted the object to last.

Why the Theme Recurs

A monochrome brief filters for tonal control, which is the least fakeable skill in photography and the one most visible at small reproduction sizes. TCG Gallery is an independent online photography gallery, and each juried exhibition remains part of a permanent public archive after its run ends, so this catalog can be read against The Monochrome Image, which sets the same problem a year later. Photographers can enter the current photography open calls directly.