Wednesday, December 30, 1998

Seeing the world in black and white

By Bob Greene

NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN, taking note of the huge national interest in the upcoming Senate trial of President Clinton, have announced that as a service to viewers, all coverage of the trial will be telecast in black and white.

Well, not really. We’re not at that point yet; the Senate proceedings will be seen in color. But if you’ve been paying attention to what is considered desirable these days, you may have noticed the concept of full color has gone decidedly out of favor. All of a sudden, for some reason, black and white is back.

The most interesting example is Polaroid’s new promotion for black and white film, as if that’s breakthrough technology. The ad copy says it: “Introducing instant black and white film.”

For those of you whose memories extend back to when Polaroid cameras were introduced, you know the original Polaroid film was black and white — you couldn’t buy the film in a color version. Your father would look at the second hand on his watch on Thanksgiving night as the film developed, would wait before peeling the covering layer back, careful not to get the goop on his fingers — and there would be the black and white image of the family gathered around the turkey. Quickly, the coating stick would be applied to preserve the picture.

Black and white Polaroid photos are as old as Polaroid itself. So why is Polaroid pushing black and white?

The ad slogan explains: “A way to make things look, well, better.”

That seems to be the current thinking: The world looks better in black and white. When Frank Sinatra died, national magazines all seemed to get the same idea: Put Sinatra on the cover, but in black and white.

Part of this was because Sinatra came to great fame in the black and white age — and part of it is that there’s something black and white about the mind’s picture of Sinatra: tuxedo, black bow tie, white shirt, black shoes. One of the most colorful entertainers in history was, at essence, a black and white guy.

Sinatra notwithstanding, magazines for the last few years have turned to black and white any time they wanted to get across an impression of realism — as if color is false and black and white is true. A recent issue of Life featured on its cover a black and white photo of Dr. David Loxterkamp of Belfast, Maine, delivering a baby. The layout inside, showing Dr. Loxterkamp “practicing medicine the old-fashioned way,” was entirely black and white.

The feature mirrors one of the most famous Life features ever, the 1948 story about a country doctor named Ernest Ceriani. The Dr. Ceriani layout was in black and white, so half a century later it was sort of a nice decision to do Dr. Loxterkamp in black and white.

And it’s everywhere: In beer commercials meant to show people who are supposedly authentic and gritty; on the American Movie Classics channel in the old films our parents watched that are now coming into favor again; in promotions that are supposed to get our attention with the implied message: Because this is black and white, you can trust it.

Art directors seem to like it because, well, because any 5-year-old with a computer these days can come up with a dizzyingly vibrant palette of color images — color graphics are literally child’s play. The world is turned around: Black and white means creative, color means predictable.

Yet the real meaning of this, if you examine it, is kind of funny. The black and white America — the America of 50 and 60 and 70 years ago, the America of RKO Pictures, of the old Life and Look, of the what’s-black-and-white-and-read-all-over newspapers — is, in memory, the America in which our parents lived. That’s one of the things that is so inviting about it.

But their America, of course, was just as colorful as ours is today. When they looked out their windows every morning, their streets and neighborhoods were filled with color. Only their movies, magazines, early television programs and other mass-market stimuli were black and white.

We never saw their world, so we imagine it in black and white. They saw their world daily. It was in living color. Their reflected world — the world the media of their day shined back at them — was the one that was black and white. It allowed them an alternate view of their reality, a bleached, darkened, yet idealized view — a view we gave up in the color age.

Bob Greene’s column regularly runs on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Chicago Tribune