Monochrome Visionaries
Primal Sight began in 2018 as a portfolio of images curated by Efrem Zelony-Mindell for the magazine
Dear Dave. A year later, on the invitation of
In the In-Between, Zelony-Mindell ran an open call for an online exhibition of contemporary black-and-white photography. More than 200 people applied â proof that, like other once traditional photographic approaches, grayscale is experiencing something of a resurgence among artists today. As a book of the project, featuring work by 146 artists probing issues of gender, race and philosophy is published by
Gnomic Book, Zelony-Mindell discusses the allure and ever shifting status of black-and-white image making.
A: Why did you decide to curate a collection of contemporary black-and-white photography in the form of a publication?
The first question is for Efrem: why did you edit a book about black-and-white photography?
Efrem Zelony-Mindell: Iâm not sure it was all that complicated when this all began, by which I mean, there wasnât a huge conceptual basis when I first started collecting images for
Primal Sight. It was in 2016 that I first started noticing black-and-white images that felt very much like they were breaking out of a canonical and modernist lens that has come to be so expected of black-and-white photography. These pictures felt. wrong, upside down, inside out, backwards. That also just so happens to be a list of my six favorite words.