Harry and Meghan, welcome to the Monochrome Set
Picture Editor; not a real job, is it? Paid to study snaps! How hard can it be? It’s not as if you’re run ragged in A&E, or toiling down a coal mine. I agree wholeheartedly. Even so, life as a Picture Editor is far more stressful than you might imagine. After a certain number of hours at the helm of the picture desk, the urge to simply swear relentlessly is often unbearable.
A soft steady rhythm – phut, Phut, PHUT, the sound of expletives uttered under my breath growing louder until sounding like some spluttering Seagull outboard-motor. Of course, you dream of truly letting off steam, which in its way, is a release valve. Yet, the stress of avoiding the rocks has one urging to vent like some exasperated ship’s foghorn.
Then along comes an image that pushes you too far and makes you want to explode like Mr Creosote from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. So, at the risk of sounding like an angry old man, which is precisely what I am, I need to get this off my chest before I detonate, frightening the newsdesk.
It’s been said that you can’t polish a turd, but even so, that’s not stopped many a charlatan from making a nice little earner rolling them in glitter. Nowadays, it would seem instead of bling, we are at the mercy of the latest gimmick, as a new panacea has become the latest comprehensive solution to an age-old problem – a lack of talent.
I’ve lost count of the number of times that after spending hours, hassling, schmoozing, pleading, sometimes begging, a PR agency or company for an image only, to curse with a word that (almost) rhymes with PHUT, on opening the email. Phut this, phut that, it’s always the phutting same.
You see, a fad has sprung forth among agencies; a trend set at the corporate HQs of the trendy young things that issue such images from exalted heights like Papal commands. And that craze is this: rather than send out a nicely composed, nicely exposed, and nicely thought out portrait or photo, now you can send out any old crap, all you have to do is make it monochrome.
Now, some folks can carry a tune, others bring us to tears, and some may even make us cry for the right reasons. It’s the same with photography, especially black and white. Its creation is a true art, one that in the right hands will have the spine-tingling with as much frequency as Meat Loaf battering out “Bat Out Of Hell” or Ian Curtis electrifying you with ”Love Will Tear Us Apart”.
That’s because Black & White is not black and white. It’s not easy; its creativity inhabits the world of shades of grey. It’s simply not as simple as taking a colour file and changing its mode. To the visually tone-deaf, that fundamental lack of understanding is why we suffer so many bum notes.
Consequently, opening an email is like pulling a creative cracker. Instead of the anticipation of discovering it holds a brilliant blast of visual inspiration, too often it’s a damp squib, inside, nothing but mediocrity, invariably in monochrome, no jokes, and it’s not funny.
So, come on Harry and Meghan, I’ve got news for you and the rest of the monochrome set, converting an image to greyscale is not like running it through some Photoshop Cartier Bresson filter. You can’t just dial in Eamon McCabe, James Nachtwey, Ian Berry or Tom Stoddart like it’s some special effect. It’s both naive and disrespectful.