Thousand words: The Power of Black and White
In May 1907, the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff saw a black and white reproduction of a painting that inspired him to compose a great symphonic poem, which he completed two years later. Rachmaninoff, however, was neither the first nor the last artist influenced by this painting, which became very popular that it served as a reference for other paintings, literature of all kinds (from novels to comics), theater, cinema, ballet and still continues to inspire music today.
The painting in question is called Die Toteninsel (The Isle of the Dead), painted in color by the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin in 1880. The painting was so successful that Böcklin created four more versions by 1886—all in color. Although the painter’s death in 1901 led to his symbolist work being considered old fashioned by modernist standards, The Isle of the Dead still remained at the heart of the intellectual and bourgeois elite of the time. Some even claim—with some exaggeration—that at the start of the 20th century, every home in Berlin had a reproduction of the painting.
Although the content of each version remains the same, some small formal aspects changed over time, such as the addition of Böcklin’s initials, the redrawing of the rocks and cypress trees, and the positioning of the boat with the woman. The most significant changes, however, were in the colors and lighting, turning the first two more melancholic versions into a lighter third version, and a darker, more tense fifth version.
A particularity, however, lies in the fourth version of the painting. Destroyed in a World War II bombing, only a black and white photograph of it remains—perhaps the one that inspired Rachmaninoff. By observing the intensity of the grayscale, the clouds, and the position of the boat, it is possible to infer that this version represented a transition between the lightness of the third version and the sepulchral tone of the fifth, when death is already entering the island.
Fourth version of The Isle of the Dead, from 1884.
The different atmospheres Böcklin created in each version of The Isle of the Dead can, at first, be attributed to the colors he used. Each color palette and tonal variation changes the way the painting is perceived and ultimately interpreted. However, behind the chromatic manifestation of each version lies Böcklin’s perfect mastery and experimentation with light, evoking distinct emotions from the same theme.
If, for physics, light is a duality between wave and particle, in photography it is what paint is to Böcklin and a musical score is to Rachmaninoff: the primary medium through which the art is made. It is no coincidence that in 1834, Hercule Florence first used the term “photographie” precisely to describe the fixing of an image through light. Whether wave or particle, light is the common denominator between painting and photography (and film, consequently) as art forms.
Formally, two-dimensional artworks like drawings, photographs, or paintings (and, why not, images created from generative models popularly known as AI) can be composed of lines, shapes, textures, and colors, emphasizing only one of these elements or combining several. Color, in turn, can be broken down into hue (its “name”), saturation (its “purity”), and luminosity (or “brightness”)—the only aspect that matters in black and white two-dimensional art. Removing the color from the other versions of The Isle of the Dead helps to illustrate this point.
First (top left), second (top right), third (bottom left), and fifth versions (bottom right) of The Isle of the Dead. Colors removed via desaturation in the RawTherapee app.
The first two versions and the fifth have little variation in luminosity, despite important chromatic distinctions between them. The third version, with its pastel tones—brighter and less saturated colors—is the one that most closely resembles the fourth, of which only a black-and-white reproduction exists. However, the fourth and fifth share a key similarity: the side lighting, illuminating the scene from left to right—hence my guess that the version lost to bombing is a transitional piece, combining the broad range of luminosity of the third with the directional light of the fifth (the first three were conceived with diffuse light).
Deprived of infinite chromatic possibilities, black-and-white two-dimensional art relies on the tripod of “lines, shapes, and textures,” while the content (message, symbol, or theme) is the surface on which this tripod stands. In the case of The Isle of the Dead, the colorless versions preserve various textures in the clouds and waters, the lines of the cypress trees are well defined (less so in the fifth, where the cypresses become a large negative space and the rock lines prevail), and, above all, the body on the boat is recognizable by its shape. Here, Böcklin uses light to give the body form, making it identifiable against a darker background in all versions, regardless of chromaticity.
Liking one version over another, whether in color or black and white, is a matter of personal aesthetic taste. Rachmaninoff, for instance, said he preferred the black and white version and that if he had seen the original in color first, he would never have written his symphonic poem named after Böcklin’s painting.
In a world that is essentially colorful, the preference for black and white reveals the power of artistic composition in which the formal elements are arranged in a way that does not depend on what the human eye has been naturally selected to see. Due to technical constraints, photography became the main reference for black-and-white two-dimensional art for much of its history, and its monochromatic gaze forced artists to explore the infinite possibilities of light variation to give form to content.
Even with cameras increasingly sensitive to color, and screens and printers ever more faithful (or even exaggerated) in color reproduction, black-and-white photography is far from sailing to the Isle of the Dead. On one hand, it documents a small part of human history. On the other, the aesthetic power of black and white allows us to portray the world in a timeless, abstract, and magical way, exploring symbols and narratives at a time of image saturation, chromatic excess, and a reality where the false passes for fact as mysteriously and dually as light behaves as both wave and particle.
Dedicated to Sebastião Salgado, the most influential documentary photographer of the 20th century.