The Are black and white portraits cheesy discussion over on the Flickr group has been really engaging.
I thought I'd seek out the views of one of our photographers, David Sillitoe, who started his career on the Guardian when we were exclusively shooting in black and white. He says this:
"On a simplistic but undeniable level the use of colour in a photograph represents the world as we actually see it, barring ocular aberrations! Black and white necessarily abstracts it. But of course there are many other ways to achieve abstraction; over and under saturating colour, changing colour balance, tonality etc. as there is no absolute true colour in a photograph, simply our own approximation of it. As to black and white; well we all have our own associations, be they jazz, film noir, classic reportage, clichéd posters etc. Whether it's these associations that constitute the 'cheesiness' is open to question. Without a satisfactory definition of the term I think the question to really ask is 'Is Photography itself cheesy?'"
I thought that was very well put by David, but I still don't know why cheesy crept in to the discussion. Are we really talking about photographic cliches?
