During the early days of photography, photographers had to live with the constraint of shooting in black and white. As successful as these photographs have been in preserving an old era, they are mostly ignored if not forgotten by the succeeding generations. After all, most people prefer to see the world in an array of vivid colours.

With advances in technology, there have been several attempts to spark people’s interest in archival materials by having them colourised. In 2017, Michael D. Carroll compiled the book Retrographic: History’s Most Exciting Images Transformed into Living Colour, which features a selection of iconic photographs meticulously colourised by professional colourists. “Black and white can make the viewer feel detached from the subject,” explained Carroll. “We hope that adding colour breathes life into historical images.”

While colourisation seems to rediscover and redefine the historical value of archival materials, critics of the practice argue that colourising vintage materials is jeopardising historical accuracy. In this sense, whether colour does any good is a question that is open to debate. By claiming that colour gives life to black and white, we appear to assume that a monochrome image connotes stifling boredom and dullness—something to be rescued by colourisation.

Contrary to what its name suggests, a black-and-white photograph is not limited to two tones, but encompasses multiple shades of grey. American photographers Ansel Adams and Fred Archer developed the Zone System around 1940, which divides the tones of a black-and-white photograph into a grey scale of 11 zones. Adams’s carefully exposed and developed black-and-white photographs, which illustrate the majestic wilderness of the American West, often make use of the full tonal range to highlight the contrast between landscapes, from snow-capped mountains to steep dark rocks and thick masses of foliage.

Ansel Adams’s aesthetic sense in photography is the embodiment of the words of Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, who said, “Colours blind the eye (五色令人目盲).” Even though this philosophical observation was made a long time before the invention of photography, it is a fitting explanation of why certain photographers continue to eschew colours in favour of black-and-white prints.

Ted Grant, the father of Canadian photojournalism, was quoted as saying: “When you photograph people in colour, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in black and white, you photograph their souls.” Bright clothes and shiny accessories might please the eye, but they can also make a portrait photo lose its power by distracting us from the individual character of the depicted subject. Through the interplay of light and shadow, a black-and-white portrait can intensify the expressive force of facial expressions, laying bare the subject’s feelings and developing emotional resonances with viewers.

One might argue that in the realm of news coverage, colour photography is better at giving an accurate portrayal of current events and bringing a sense of immediacy. Yet, with a knack for capturing moments of humanity, photographers are able to deliver riveting works that are made all the more intriguing by eliminating colour. James Nachtwey, one of today’s best-known contemporary photojournalists, has covered humanitarian crises around the globe. He takes most of his pictures in black and white because he believes that this can distil the essence of what is happening without colour competing for our attention. Rather than a distortion of reality, his monochromatic works are regarded as a powerful and eloquent testimony to the extreme brutality of wars and the immense suffering endured by innocent victims.

One of James Nachtwey’s best-known photographs was taken while he was covering the war in Afghanistan in 1996. It depicts a grieving woman kneeling down in front of the grave of her brother, who was killed in a rocket attack by the Taliban. In a futile attempt to get close to her loved one, she lays her hand on his gravestone. Behind her are many more graves, stretching to the horizon. Here, black and white not only builds up a sombre and melancholy mood but also brings out details that would likely have gone unnoticed in a colour photograph—the wrinkles on the woman’s hand that stand as marks of a life of hardship, the barren land honeycombed with cracks that describes a landscape as desolate as the war-ravaged country’s near future. If the photograph had been taken in colour, it would have been difficult to evoke the same level of poignancy and sympathy.

In an era flooded with information, colour photography is a faithful reflection of an elusive reality that comes and goes in the blink of an eye. All hues and tones are preserved as they were. Still, time has not rendered black-and-white photography obsolete. As a beautiful art form in its own right, it can imbue works with meaning and emotion. Look beyond black and white and you will see more than meets the eye.