We are told to see in a hundred shades of gray. The photographs that work usually hold up in two.
Seeing in tone instead of color is one of those things everyone agrees matters and almost nobody can explain how to do. We are told to look past color, to read the light, to imagine the scene in black and white before we press the shutter. The trouble is that it asks us to see everything at once, every shade from the deepest shadow to the brightest highlight, while the world in front of us is shouting in color. A little over a hundred years ago, an art teacher and a Boston museum curator had a much simpler answer, and it is worth remembering that photographers were taught it once already.
What notan actually means
Notan is a Japanese word made of two characters, one meaning dark and one meaning pale, and in Japanese it can describe anything from the shading in a painting to the depth of a flavor. In Western art it came to mean something much more specific, the pattern of dark and light in a picture with everything else taken away. No color, no texture, no detail, and no gray. Just dark shapes and light shapes, and how they sit against each other.
The idea is almost embarrassingly simple. We look at a scene and sort everything in it into two piles, anything darker than the middle in one and anything lighter in the other. What we are left with is a picture made of flat shapes, a little like a paper cutout, and that pattern is the notan of the photograph. It is the bones of the image, the part that actually has to work before anything else can.
It works like the melody of a song
The easiest way to understand it is to think about music. If we take a song we love and strip away everything, the drums, the strings, the production, even the words, what is left is the tune someone could hum walking down the street. That tune is the melody, and a genuinely good song survives being hummed. The arrangement makes it richer, but the arrangement was never what made it good.
A photograph works the same way. The notan is the melody, the two tone pattern holding the picture together, and the full range of grays is the arrangement laid over the top. When the melody is strong, the grays make it beautiful. When the melody is weak, no amount of careful tonal work will rescue it, in the same way no string section ever saved a song nobody could hum. Why do some black and white photographs feel strong from across a room, before we can even tell what they are of? We are hearing the melody.
Photographers have been taught this before
The word came to America through Ernest Fenollosa, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and it was an art teacher named Arthur Wesley Dow who turned it into a way of teaching. His book Composition, published in 1899, set out three building blocks for any picture, line, notan and color, and it became a standard textbook in American art education.
What is less well known is how much of it reached photographers. Dow hired Clarence White to teach photography at Teachers College in 1907, and when White opened his own school in New York in 1914, the painter Max Weber built its teaching around Dow’s design principles. The students who came through that school include Paul Outerbridge, Laura Gilpin, Karl Struss and Doris Ulmann. Some of the most important American photographers of the early twentieth century learned to see dark and light shapes before they thought about anything else.
How it changes the way we look
In practice it comes down to one question before the camera comes up. Where is the big dark shape, and where is the big light one? Not the subject, not the story, just the two piles. If the subject is a dark shape against a light ground, or a light shape against a dark one, the picture has a melody. If the subject and everything around it land in the same pile, it will almost always come out as gray mush whatever we do later. That is actually the real reason some scenes that look wonderful in color fall flat the moment they are converted.
The same test works afterwards. Photoshop has a Threshold adjustment that turns every pixel pure black or pure white, and running a photograph through it for a second shows the notan instantly. Once the two tone version holds up, it is worth adding a third value, a single middle gray, and seeing whether that settles the shapes further. Working from two values to three, and only then to everything in between, turns an impossible task into a series of small ones.
None of this replaces the full range of tones that makes a black and white print so rich, and nobody is suggesting we start making photographs in pure black and white. The point is simply that the grays are the arrangement, and the arrangement only ever works on top of something that could already stand on its own. Seeing in tone gets a great deal easier once we stop trying to hear the whole orchestra at once and start listening for the tune.