To accompany the release of his book Lumière, published by Éditions Allary, Matthieu Ricard is offering a series of blogs on photography. An invitation to share wonder, celebrate the beauty of the world, and continue the quest for light that has guided him throughout his sixty-year journey.
“Color is joy. One does not think joy. One is carried by it.” — Ernst Haas
Steve Edwards, Professor of the History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck, University of London, tells us that around twenty people claimed authorship of the invention of photography during the first half of the nineteenth century. Numerous researchers and inventors, working in isolation, indeed developed various processes to fix an image onto a support through the use of different chemical compounds, achieving results of uneven quality. However, among them, only four or five individuals were truly responsible for fundamental discoveries and significant advances.
These images captured varying intensities of light on a surface, translating them into areas of brightness ranging from the deepest black to the purest white. Photography was therefore naturally born in black and white. It is quite likely that, had the pioneers of photography achieved the additional feat of capturing images in color, they would certainly not have deprived themselves of that possibility, and black-and-white photography would probably not have enjoyed the same remarkable rise, eventually attaining the status of a foundational art form of photography.
A great number of twentieth-century photographers who marked the history of photography—Ansel Adams, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson (“the eye of the century”), René Burri, Josef Koudelka, Ian Berry, Werner Bischof, Édouard Boubat, Robert Doisneau, Cristina García Rodero, Dorothea Lange, Raghu Rai, Marc Riboud, and many others—photographed exclusively in black and white. For these photographers of the decisive moment, color would have added nothing and could even be seen as a distraction liable to eclipse the main subject of a photograph. And yet, it is hard to imagine Steve McCurry’s iconic photograph of the Afghan Girl without her otherworldly intense green eyes, just as it is impossible to imagine Van Gogh’s Starry Night or Monet’s The Artist’s Garden at Giverny in black and white. Ernst Haas summed up this situation remarkably well: “Color does not mean black and white plus color. Black and white is not an image without color either. Each requires a different awareness of vision and, consequently, a different discipline. The decisive moments in black and white and in color are not the same.”
Since the world is not black and white, none of the great painters of the past—from Rembrandt to Monet, including Turner—ever thought of painting in black and white. These painters often expressed their essential relationship to color, as Kandinsky did in a 1914 text: “This love of nature was composed primarily of the pure joy and enthusiasm that color gave me. Often a patch of clear blue with powerful resonance glimpsed in the shadow of a thicket would so captivate me that I painted an entire landscape solely to fix that patch.”
Cézanne spoke many times on this subject: “Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else—by color. I was satisfied with myself when I discovered that.” He added: “Drawing and color are in no way two different things. When you paint, you draw… When color is at its richest, form is at its fullest.”
The first color film accessible to everyone—the famous Kodachrome, to which so many photographers remained faithful for a long time—appeared in 1935. I myself used Kodachrome 12 ASA film in the 1960s, a sensitivity unimaginable today, when one can now routinely photograph at 3200 ASA and even, with some cameras, up to 100,000 ASA. The introduction of Kodachrome II at 25 ASA, and later at 64 ASA, was perceived as a luxury at the time! In India, when I was living in Darjeeling, I had to send my films to the Kodak laboratory in Bombay, and they came back to me a month later by post in a small yellow package that I opened with impatience and delight. Seventy-five years later, in 2010, the very last roll of Kodachrome was entrusted to Steve McCurry, who carefully exposed its 36 frames in India for National Geographic, symbolizing the end of an era.
In 1950, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) presented the work of various artists and marked a first exploration of color photography in the context of fine arts. But color was still far from being accepted, and the great photographer Edward Steichen, who was then head of the museum’s photography department, held a very reserved opinion: “This exhibition raises more questions than it provides answers, because despite fine individual achievements and rich promises, color photography as a means of expression for the artist remains an enigma.”
It was Ernst Haas who brought color into photographic art through the front door. According to Steve Melzer, he was the one who “broke the black-and-white glass ceiling” and “changed the world of photography with an explosion of color.” Haas first experimented with Kodachrome in 1949 and was immediately captivated by this new way of expressing himself. Along with the superb nature photographer Eliot Porter and a few others, Haas thus became one of the first convincing advocates of the creative potential of color photography.
In 1951, Life magazine published a striking twenty-four-page color essay by Haas on New York entitled Images of a Magic City, the largest color photo feature ever published at the time. In 1962, Haas was invited to exhibit his color photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, an exhibition that marked a turning point in the recognition of color photography in the art world. On that occasion, Edward Steichen was finally convinced and commented about Haas: “He is a free spirit, liberated from traditions and theories, who went out in search of an unparalleled beauty in the realm of photography.”
You can find this entire photographic project in Lumière, published by Éditions Allary.
Matthieu Ricard donates all of his income—royalties from his books, photographs, and lectures—to development projects run by the Karuna-Shechen association, which works to reduce poverty and empower the most vulnerable women, men, and children. In this way, every reader becomes a direct contributor to solidarity through their purchase.
References
Steve Edwards, Photography, A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press.
Ernst Haas, On Photography. https://ernst-haas.com/writings-by-haas/
W. Kandinsky, The Grammar of Creation, in Complete Writings, vol. II, edited and introduced by Philippe Sers, Denoël-Gonthier, 1970, p. 271.
Statements by Cézanne reported in Denis Maurice, Journal, vol. II (1905–1920), Paris, La Colombe / Éditions du Vieux Colombier, 1957, p. 28-30.
Steve Melzer, How Pioneering Photographer Ernst Haas Changed the Photo World with a Burst of Color. Shutterbug (2015). https://www.shutterbug.com/content/how-pioneering-photographer-ernst-haas-changed-photo-world-burst-color.
Eliot Porter (1901-1990), renowned in particular for his photographs of birds and his intimate images of nature, later became director of the Sierra Club. He wrote: « Above all, a work of art is a creation of love. […] Love is the fundamental necessity underlying the need to create, which underlies the emotion that gives it form »
See the press release issued by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) on the occasion of the 1950 exhibition. https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_325728.pdf
Campbell, Bryn, ed. (1981). World Photography. Ziff-Davis Books. pp. 134–13