Color or Black and White?

Before starting this response I felt obligated to go back to one of the first posts I made and read over my initial take on the question. I wrote that I felt that color was distracting in a photograph. With that in mind, I'm pleased to be able to basically rewrite an answer to the recurring question of which is better, black and white or color photography?

I started this semester with absolutely no color experience other than on family vacations. I think that this is the case for the majority of people. For many years color images were just associated with those posed pictures of a group of on top of a mountain or next to a landmark, etc. Keeping in mind however, that photography has been around for hundreds of year prior to color. Black and white photography was a tradition that we were comfortable with. Not to say that the introduction of color was a bad thing, because that's not at all how I feel, but since Kodak introduced color film in the 1930s and then the first commercial digital camera in the 1990s this black and white tradition has obviously taken a hit. Because color film was made so available and now it seems that everyone has a digital camera photography is not restricted to artists. Where the question arises, what makes art art? Anyway, since everyone can take a picture and have a print in front of them a minute later it makes color photography seem less genuine and romantic than black and white.

There were a few points this semester when things were going almost a bit too smoothly and I was missing the of the developing process and the darkroom. There is a hidden charm in the frustrating surprise that you overexposed an entire roll or exposed an entire box of paper to light or maybe even forgetting to put film in your camera. With digital technology I can take a few hundred photos, immediately realize that they are all blurry and retake a few hundred more on the spot (I am obviously associating color with digital now, but at this point I can't help myself because I haven't used color film in seven years).

Regarding the question at hand, I believe there is no answer, only personal preference and I remain fairly neutral. There is without a doubt a gray area surrounding the question, no pun intended. For me, I could not imagine doing my final project in black and white. Despite the unintentional red and yellowness from the printer I just don't think that black and white alone would have been able to capture the varying tones in the pages of the books or in the clippings of words. I think I've written too much, so I'm just going to say that my answer to this question will never be consistent.