Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Photograph by Zheng Letian. Image courtesy of M+. On March 16, M+, Hong Kong’s museum of visual culture, opened its first exhibition devoted to black-and-white photography, “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography.” Amid the bustle of Hong Kong Art Week, it stood out for the sheer economy of its black-and-white palette and its distinctive aesthetic.

“I think black-and-white photography has a particularly powerful force when it comes to expressing ideas and capturing emotion, atmosphere, and fleeting moments, and it can convey a certain specific message,” the exhibition’s curator, and M+’s Lead Curator of Visual Art, Shirley Yik, told us. Mario Giacomelli, “Io non ho mani che mi accarezzino il volto,” photographed from 1961 to 1963, printed circa 1971, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris. © Mario Giacomelli Archives. The exhibition also includes a number of important works by the renowned Chinese photographers Ho Fan, Yau Leung, and Chan Fook Lei. Black-and-white photography, invented in the 1820s, has now endured for more than 180 years. It has survived countless technical revolutions in image-making and still retains a singular place in art.

Its deep yet subtle command of reality, its restrained distance, and its distinct artistic character continue to draw photographers in. In the last week of March, we visited M+ and spoke with Shirley Yik about the development of black-and-white photography over the past century and the moving stories behind these images. Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Photograph by Zheng Letian. Image courtesy of M+. Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. The exhibition surveys more than a century of black-and-white photography, from 1915 to 2019, and is organized into three sections: “Contrasts,” “Light and Shadow,” and “Spectrum.” It presents more than 280 works by more than 170 internationally known photographers, including Liu Heung Shing, Yau Leung, Ho Fan, Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson, Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Diane Arbus, and Mario Giacomelli.

Entering the galleries, we found that the exhibition’s three sections are not arranged chronologically. Instead, they set black-and-white aesthetics and image-making techniques from different periods and places into conversation.

Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Photograph by Zheng Letian. Image courtesy of M+. Lai Chiu Fong, “Black and White,” 1950s to 1960s, M+, Hong Kong. © All rights reserved. Kurita Koichiro, “Snow on Stone,” photographed in 1988, printed in 1990. “Most of the works in the M+ collection come from Asia, while the works from the Bibliotheque nationale de France, which co-organized the exhibition with us, are mostly from Europe and the United States. I think putting them together creates a very good dialogue.”

We also noticed that some works were framed in wood, while others were in black frames.

“For this exhibition, we selected works from the M+ collection to pair with holdings from the Bibliotheque nationale de France, so the works from the Bibliotheque nationale de France use natural wood frames, and the works from M+ use black frames. That way, visitors can immediately tell which institution a work comes from.”

Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Photograph by Zheng Letian. Image courtesy of M+. Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Chan Fook Lei, “Untitled,” 1960s. This intriguing East-West exchange runs through the entire exhibition. In the first section, “Contrasts,” one especially representative pairing sets two 1960s landscape photographs by the Asian pioneer Chan Fook Lei against works made in the 1980s by the French photographer Pierre de Fenoÿl.

Born in Guangdong in 1916, Chan Fook Lei lived in mainland China, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Hong Kong, among other places. He died in 2018. Having lived for more than a century, and witnessed a century of photographic development, he was affectionately known as “Old Master Chan.” He was the first photographer to propose combining the realism of photography with the pictorial spirit of traditional Chinese painting, bringing together subjective mood and formal beauty, and opening a path for Chinese expressive landscape photography that had not existed before.

Chan Fook Lei, “Untitled” (detail), 1960s. Chan Fook Lei, “Fishing Boats on the River,” 1950s-60s. “From Chan Fook Lei’s photographs, you can see that he inherited the tradition of Chinese landscape painting. The image is more vertical. In the background, you can see dark and light areas, and he uses those tones to create depth, just as Chinese painters usually do in ink painting. And ink painting is black and white too, right?”

Yik asked with a laugh. Seen from a distance, these two works can indeed be mistaken for traditional Chinese ink paintings: their veiled mist, fused mountain-and-water vistas, and evening fishing boats have the freehand ease of literati painting. Pierre de Fenoÿl, “Landscape,” 1986. Nearby, de Fenoÿl’s work is distinctly Western, making a strong contrast with Chan Fook Lei’s Eastern style. Its composition clearly draws on the Western landscape tradition, tending toward a horizontal format, and its clouds and play of light have a more realist effect.

Left: Ho Fan, “Approaching Shadow,” 1951. Right: Charles Harbutt, “World, New York City Hall Clerk,” 1970. Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Another compelling juxtaposition places an important work by Ho Fan, “the greatest Chinese street photographer,” beside a photograph by Charles Harbutt. Both pictures feature window grids and silhouettes; one captures the loneliness of an urban Hong Kong figure behind metal panes, while the other conveys the bitterness of a forgotten minor clerk in New York City Hall.

Ho Fan, “The Melody,” 1952. An old photograph of Ho Fan. Ho Fan was born in Shanghai and moved to Hong Kong with his family when he was young. Many of his photographs of everyday Hong Kong life were made in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was in his twenties, at the height of youth. In street life he found an artful landscape: office workers, rickshaw pullers, construction laborers, blind musicians, and hurried crowds all took on a beautifully fractured quality through his lens.

Ho Fan, “Approaching Shadow,” 1951. Charles Harbutt, “World--New York City Hall Clerk,” 1970. His work was not admired only by Asian viewers; the international photography world also held it in high regard. He received more than 280 international photography awards, and the Photographic Society of America named him one of the “Top Ten Photographers of the World” for eight consecutive years.

“Both Ho Fan’s and Harbutt’s works use the motif of a figure silhouetted in a window, and although the two photographers come from different cultural backgrounds, we found many similar details in the photographs.” Yik said that when the team was selecting works from the M+ collection, this juxtaposition came as a particular surprise.

Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Photograph by Leung Yu Chung. Image courtesy of M+. Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. The photographer Diane Arbus appears in another comparison that is hard to ignore: three pairs of “sisters.”

“Diane Arbus was an American photographer, and one of the most famous and iconic figures in photographic history. She died very young; the ending was somewhat tragic. The photograph she made of this pair of identical twins is a very important work. She printed the photograph herself and donated it to the Bibliotheque nationale de France.” Yik told us that this gesture was exceptionally rare; in effect, the artist herself selected the work for the collection.

Diane Arbus, “Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J.,” 1966. The two girls in the photograph are dressed exactly alike, and the composition has a beautiful symmetry, making it a classic black-and-white image. But if you keep looking at it, an odd chill gradually sets in for reasons that are hard to name.

“That, too, is characteristic of Arbus’s work. Very often she photographed children or people laughing, but the pictures still feel a little eerie, producing a different sort of response.” Vivan Sundaram, “Two Sisters and Two Girls,” 2001, M+, Hong Kong. © Vivan Sundaram. Another work related to the theme of “sisters” is by the Indian artist Vivan Sundaram.

“The subjects of this work are the very important modernist painter Amrita Sher-Gil and her sister, one seated and one reclining. Behind them is Amrita’s 1939 painting Two Girls, so the two form an exact echo.” Yik said. Yau Leung, “Two Ladies (Gloucester Road),” 1961, M+, Hong Kong. © Photo Pictorial Publishers Ltd. An old photograph of Yau Leung. The final work in this “sisters” grouping is by the celebrated Hong Kong photographer Yau Leung.

Born in 1941, Yau Leung had been working in photography since the 1960s. He loved recording every stratum of Hong Kong life, using his camera to register the city’s profound social transformations. This photograph is one of his important works: two stylish Hong Kong women in cheongsams walk down a Hong Kong street in the 1960s, their swaying backs inviting reverie. The works in the exhibition repeatedly call up the surging Hong Kong of the 1950s and 1960s.

“Foundational figures in Asian photography such as Ho Fan, Lang Jingshan, Chan Fook Lei, and Yau Leung captured early cityscapes and natural landscapes. I think these are works that particularly resonate with Chinese viewers,” Yik said.

Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Photograph by Leung Yu Chung. Image courtesy of M+. Ho Fan, “A Hong Kong Memoir,” 1959. © Ho Fan. Shaping and capturing light and shadow has always been one of photography’s deepest fascinations. The exhibition’s second section, “Light and Shadow,” unfolds from that premise. Ho Fan’s “A Hong Kong Memoir” is one of the important works in the M+ collection. In it, he caught the rare sight of actual mist suspended in midair, out of which the backs of numerous suited figures emerge.

The only person facing the camera is a short-haired woman in a patterned jacket. The whole image presents a hybrid, dazzlingly strange Hong Kong of the 1960s. Ho Fan, “Shadow,” 1954. Another work by Ho Fan likewise demonstrates his technical precision: a young woman leans against a wall, and before her falls a sharply defined geometric diagonal shadow. Ho Fan was only 23 when he made it.

“This work is called Shadow, and the title matches the image very closely. The model was Ho Fan’s cousin. The effect you see in the photograph is not what he captured on-site. Originally, the shadow may have been quite light. When he printed the image in the darkroom, he intensified that area so that it became very clear and sharp. It also suggests the passing of youth.” Yik told us that photography is in fact a very distinctive medium because it has two stages.

“The first is taking the photograph, and the second is producing the image as a work. In both stages, artists have the chance to alter, manipulate, or apply their own creative expression. Photographers use light and shadow as techniques to create different scenes, and they create many different moods as well.” Lang Jingshan, “Raft Floating on Golden Ripples,” 1930. Lang Jingshan (left) and Chan Fook Lei (right). Lang Jingshan was one of China’s earliest photographers and has been called “the father of Asian photography.” In the 1930s and 1940s, when he was active, printing technology was still relatively undeveloped. In this work, he printed multiple negatives from different scenes together, using double exposure.

“He was the first photographer to use this technique, and if you look closely at the picture, you can also see that he signed it and stamped several small seals on it, very much in the manner of traditional Chinese painting,” Yik said.

Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Photograph by Leung Yu Chung. Image courtesy of M+. This wall is devoted to works by Man Ray. Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Aleksandras Macijauskas, “In the Market,” 1976. We also noticed that, although the exhibition focuses on “black-and-white photography,” many of the prints on view, including “Raft Floating on Golden Ripples,” contain yellow and brown tones beyond black and white.

“‘Black and white’ can actually include many different tones. Sometimes there is a slight yellow cast, sometimes a slight brown one. That may be because photographers used different kinds of paper, or because they were trying to achieve certain effects by adding a fixer. It is quite possible that some fixer was added during the production of Raft Floating on Golden Ripples.”

“And especially with older photographs, over time they can age, and their tones may shift somewhat.” Yik answered our question.

Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Photograph by Leung Yu Chung. Image courtesy of M+. Aleksandr Rodchenko, “Girl with a Leica,” photographed in 1934, printed circa 1950, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris. © Aleksandr Rodchenko. The oldest work in the exhibition dates from 1915, while the most recent was made in 2019, and the techniques and materials used in the two photographs are entirely different.

“You can imagine that in 1915 photographers had access to a very limited range of materials, and the kinds of paper used for film were quite different as well. They may not have been able to capture all the contrast that photographers today can achieve with digital technology and contemporary papers.”

Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Photograph by Leung Yu Chung. Image courtesy of M+. In the exhibition’s final section, the circular gallery is especially striking. The works are arranged as a sequence of tonal gradations. As you move around the room, you pass from black to gray to white, tracing the full evolution and distribution of photography across the black-and-white spectrum.

“I think people who truly love photography will especially enjoy this section. We restored the two ends of the black-and-white spectrum, along with the middle tones used in most black-and-white photography. Starting with the darkest works, you walk all the way around the room until you reach the brightest and whitest ones. We arranged the works entirely according to the principle of showing this very slow, subtle gradation and the constantly shifting shades of gray.” Yik told us that the neighboring works viewers see in the gallery would not ordinarily be placed together, because their subjects are different.

But because their tones harmonize, this exhibition reorders and recombines them in a new way, creating a fresh kind of curatorial pleasure.

Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Photograph by Leung Yu Chung. Image courtesy of M+. Rossella Bellusci, “Still Life Series Three, Bottle,” 1988. The whitest work in the exhibition left a particularly deep impression on us. At first, we thought it was simply a blank sheet of paper. Only when we stepped closer did we realize that it seemed to depict a transparent glass bottle. We could see almost nothing but its top and bottom. The image was so spare it resembled a sketch just newly blocked in.

“The Italian photographer Rossella Bellusci once spoke about this work,” Yik said, deeply moved by the remark. “She said, ‘The bottle is not empty, but full of light.’”

“Black and white always carry symbolic meaning for us, right? We often think of white as emptiness, as nothingness. But Bellusci is trying to say that white can be full, can be abundant. It’s a very subtle and beautiful idea.” Yves Guillot, “Still Life,” 1986. Imogen Cunningham, “Two Callas,” photographed in 1925, printed circa 1970, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.

© 2024 Imogen Cunningham Trust. Cecil Beaton, “Balenciaga Evening Dress,” 1967, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris. Cecil Beaton Archive © Condé Nast. Throughout the conversation, Yik kept emphasizing that photography is, in fact, an unusually plural art form. It is material, physical, and technical; but at the same time it possesses a distinctive and enduring aesthetic character. It is dynamic, and it allows people to explore all sorts of possibilities.

“Photography is an art medium grounded in technology. You can understand it in a very scientific way: how it is made, printed, reproduced, and even preserved in a very scientific way. But at the same time, you can also understand it in a very artistic way: how a work moves your emotions and makes you think. That is what is unique about photographic art. You can understand it from two very different perspectives, rational and emotional.”

Yik said.

Installation view of “The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Noir & Blanc—A Story of Photography,” 2024. Photograph by Leung Yu Chung. Image courtesy of M+. Gilbert Fastenaekens, “Nocturne—Refuge,” photographed in 1982, printed in 1983, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris. © Gilbert Fastenaekens. Rene Burri, “China, Beijing, Kunming Lake,” 1964, Bibliotheque nationale de France, Paris.

© Rene Burri/Magnum Photos. Unlike film, where black-and-white cinema quickly receded after the arrival of color, black-and-white photography survived the boom of color photography in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the long post-millennium era in which everyone could become a photographer. As an art form, it still possesses a vigorous life. Perhaps that is because it is both concrete and abstract, both connected to daily life and held at a certain poetic distance, allowing us to see this inherently colorful world in another way.

Some images courtesy of M+ Museum.