The current use of black and white photography goes beyond The Challenge — indeed, some have noticed a connection between its look and the aesthetics of Taylor Swift’s much-talked-about new album, folklore . But, the history of black and white photography obviously goes much further back. For as long as there’s been colour photography, making the choice to use black and white instead has communicated an introspective seriousness, a kind of clarity of moral and artistic intent — it recalls Ansel Adams’ majestic landscapes, Robert Mapplethorpe’s boundary-breaking portraits, and Dorothea Lange’s humanizing images of American poverty. “There’s this idea that there’s something kind of truer about black and white,” says David Campany, managing director of programs at the International Center of Photography in New York. “On a technical level, it’s actually less true, because it’s less realistic, it’s got less information about the world. But on top of that, we have all sorts of metaphors about black and white: If you ask someone to give you the unvarnished truth, you'll say, ‘give it to me in black and white.’ So we have this idea that facts are black and white and colour is some kind of wild, luxurious distraction. Which I don’t think is true at all.”