How I Use Black and White: Killing Light to Direct Attention

I do not work in black and white because I cannot work with colour. I paint. When I can, I make my own colours by grinding pigments. Colour has weight, history and material intelligence for me.

I work in black and white because it allows me to remove certain things from an image and make other things impossible to ignore.

Black and white is not the absence of colour. It is a decision about attention.

Contrast is not decoration

When colour leaves a photograph, texture changes its role. A reflection becomes more physical. A crease in fabric can become a line of force. Skin, paint, metal, hair and shadow begin to speak through their different densities rather than their different hues.

This is where I start. I think about textures, reflections, repetition, interruptions and the paths the eye will take across the frame. I do not ask how to add more light. I ask how to kill enough light to create atmosphere without losing the person inside it.

“Killing light” is not a technical recipe. It is an attitude. It means refusing the assumption that everything deserves equal visibility. A photograph becomes more directed when it knows what it is willing to withhold.

The painting is designed for the conversion

In many of my portraits, the painted background is made with the final black-and-white image already in mind. The painting may be coloured, but colour is not its only function. I need the surface to hold when it is translated into tonal layers: dark masses, interruptions of white, areas that recede, marks that become almost architectural once hue has been removed.

The person does not simply stand in front of the painting. The painting becomes part of the composition’s pressure. It can create distance, give the figure a silhouette to resist, or make the body feel as though it has emerged from a material field.

This is why I do not see the background as a backdrop. It is another actor in the portrait.

A lateral approach to mood

Many visual languages use black and white as an immediate signal: seriousness, nostalgia, fashion, cinema, documentary. These associations are available, but they are not enough for me.

I am interested in black and white as a lateral way of creating a mood. Instead of asking how to make an image feel dramatic, I ask what needs to be reduced so that drama can appear. Instead of adding atmosphere with an obvious effect, I look for a relationship between shadow and surface that can make the viewer pause.

A useful image does not always guide the eye by showing more. It can guide the eye by making absence active.

This is close to what I value in certain poster systems and calligraphic structures: a pattern becomes legible because repetition and interruption are held in tension. The eye is not merely entertained; it is given a route.

Directing the gaze without forcing it

Every image directs attention. The question is whether it does so crudely or with enough space for the viewer to enter.

I use contrast to establish hierarchy. The face may be present, but not fully exposed. A hand may carry more tension than an expression. A dark edge can delay the reading of the figure. A bright mark in the painting can become the counterweight that keeps the image from closing too quickly.

These are not tricks. They are compositional decisions. They are also emotional decisions, because where the image asks the eye to stay determines where the image asks the viewer to feel.

Black and white makes this relationship more visible to me. It forces me to answer a simple question: if colour cannot carry the picture, what is the picture actually made of?

The answer is usually not “light.” It is the conversation between light, darkness, material and the person who has agreed to enter that field.

I use black and white to make a photograph less descriptive and more deliberate: not to remove the world, but to decide which parts of it deserve to stay.