Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]

 Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography. 

Roland Barthes
[Writer, critic, and theorist, b. 1915, Cherbourg, d. 1980, Paris.]

 For me, color is an artifice, a cosmetic (like the kind used to paint corpses). 

Philip Jones Griffiths
[Photojournalist, b. 1936, Rhuddian, Wales, d. 2008, London.]

 Let’s assume that all the cassettes of monochrome film Cartier-Bresson ever exposed had somehow been surreptitiously loaded with colour film. I’d venture to say that about two thirds of his pictures would be ruined and the remainder unaffected, neither spoiled nor improved. And perhaps one in a thousand enhanced. 

Abbas (Abbas Attar)
[Photographer, b. 1944, Iran, d. 2018, Paris.]

 The world may be color but black and white transcends it. 

Jean-Luc Godard
[Filmmaker, b. 1930, Paris, lives in Rolle, Switzerland.]

 Photography could have been invented in color. Colors existed. 

Paul Gauguin
[Artist, b. 1848, Paris, d. 1903, Hiva Oa, Marquesas Islands.]

 Do you know what will soon be the ultimate in truth?—photography, once it begins to reproduce colors, and that won’t be long in coming. And yet you want an intelligent man to sweat for months so as to give the illusion he can do something as well as an ingenious little machine can! 

William Eggleston
[Photographer, b. 1939, Memphis, Tennessee, lives in Memphis.]

 The way I have always looked at it is the world is in color. And there’s nothing we can do about that. 

Allan Sekula
[Photographer, writer, and theorist, b. 1951, Erie, Pennsylvania, d. 2013, Los Angeles.]

 Black-and-white photos tell the truth. That’s why insurance companies use them. 
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