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In high school, I went on a field trip to the MFA to see a black and white photography exhibit for a black and white photography class. A student was describing one of the prints, which happened to be a landscape, as being multicolored. There were patches of land of varying earth colors that were separated by a dark brown dirt road. The print was in black and white, so there were no green wavelengths of light traveling to my or the students eye from the grassy scene. There wasn’t even a combination of wavelengths, just black and white. However, for a moment we both subconsciously interpreted the photograph to be green. Why would the student say there was color in a black and white print, which clearly didn’t have color? 

This reminds me of the movie Pleasantville, where a world in Black and White suddenly fills with color. There is a scene where someone is describing the color red. She says it isn’t red (meaning red under a black and white projection) but red red (with actual red wavelengths that hit the cones in our eyes). 

This reminds me of the “filling in process” that our brains use to compensate for blind spots and discontinuity of our vision. This isn’t the same, but could fall under a similar idea. Due to personally learned experiences, I recognize grass as being green and I recognize dirt as being brown. When I saw the black and white picture, my brain perhaps translated these learned perceptions onto the print. I wasn’t seeing color, but I was mentally associating color with a black and white image that under my normal circumstances embodies color.

Colors, as well as black, white and grey embody qualities such as hue, saturation, brightness, texture and gloss. These features add dimension to black and white images, which could perhaps aid the brain in associating real colors with black and white images.