What is more informative...form or color?
Take for example this famous image, from the Vietnam war of a little girl, naked and covered with napalm burns. Associated Press photographer Nick Ut captured the shot in 1972, just before helping the 9-year-old girl to a hospital in South Vietnam. What if the image were in color? What if you could see the blood and burns on her skin? What if you could tell the grass behind her was not green but covered in ash? What if you could see that the smoke in the background was red and full of flames? Would it make it any more devastating? Or is it just as much or more powerful in B&W?
I think of Steve McCurry as the photographer who shot the "girl with the green eyes". This iconic image of the Afghani refugee was taken by McCurry, a National Geographic photographer, and became wildly famous. Would it be as powerful if her eyes were not green but brown? What if the background wasn't green? What if the shot was in B&W? Would it be as striking?
Photographer/astronomers in the 1800's were fascinated with photographing the moon when only black and white photography was available. They could see through the telescope more or less what it looked like, but how important was it for them to record that image in color? Color photographs were taken by the first men on the moon in the late 1960's of the "moon soil". The photos show the gradations of gray, but could almost be mistaken for black and white images. How much more powerful was it for the American people to see the first photos on the moon containing a flag in color and a blue earth in the distance? Would those first man-on-the-moon pictures be just as powerful had they been in B&W?
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