Sunday, June 21, 2020

Black-and-White Photography/Morality

My one great, but entirely unnoticed, contribution to understanding late 20th C culture was to bring to awareness the unconscious association between black-and-white photography and black-and-white morality, written early in my blogging career.  As a new McCarthyism is increasingly normative for public discourse, I would appreciate it if you could all pass along to the artistic types who are your friends that using the metaphor of B&W photography to describe Critical Theory and all its cousins is now back up for grabs again.

I include, of course, all the milk-and-water descendants of Theory who pretend they aren't, really, because they wear fig leaves and aren't violent themselves. Their speeches should be converted to black-and-white film as well. 

6 comments:

David Foster said...

Someone overheard a group of kids in the Holocaust Museum commenting that it didn't seem real because all the pictures were in black & white/

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Good evidence for my point. Thanks.

Christopher B said...

If I remember my college film class correctly, Oz was shot in color to emphasize it was a dream sequence. In Dorothy's case the real world was black and white, like the news reels.

David Foster said...

In the Russian movie 'The Dawns Here Are Quiet', the events in the movie's real time are shown in black & white, the flashbacks to earlier times are in color.

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/63022.html

Douglas2 said...

Wrong word alert:
the unconscious association between black-and-white morality and black-and-white morality,

I'm thinking that as it links to an article subtitled Black & White Photography Creates The Illusion Of Black & White Morality, that one of those moralities is a photography

Douglas2

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Fixed. thanks