will,
i'd like to go back to your thesis: b&w attracts us as that's how we see at night.
in his book "the inner game of outdoor photography" galen rowell has an essay called: 'the doors of perception (p.48)' where he discusses the retenix theory of edward land, poloroid inventor. i quote,
"Land conclusively demonstrated in several ways that the eye senses only black and white and that our experience of color is entirely a construct of our minds that varies tremendously.
"Although texts continue to say that the cones in our eyes see color, while rods see only black and white, Land has turned the tables to make subjects sense color with strictly their rods in extremely low light. He has also demonstrated how almost all common colors can be made to appear from information delivered by a triplet of cones that are not responsive to 'individual' colors. In a process somewhat like merging black and white negatives made with different filters, the three types of cones deliver colorless responses to broad, overlapping bands of wavelengths together with all-important lightness information about reflectivity derived by comparison of the triplet of responses. The color is in our heads."
"Land's radical answer is that our eyes don't respond to color at all. Quite literally, color is a figment of our imagination."
he follows up with two more essays 'eye of the beholder' and 'visual reality'.
http://www.amazon.com/Galen-Rowells...=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233713141&sr=1-2
so, in this scenerio b&w photos
remove interpretation! and show the world as it really is.
far-fetched? rowell discusses
an anthropologist on mars by oliver sacks and the first essay 'the case of the colorblind artist'. it's an amazing substantiation of your theory. an auto accident and concussion cause a 65 year old painter to lose his ability to see color. at first he thinks he still knows how color looks and paints with it. but he doesn't (examples given). eventually he not only accepts his condition but makes hay of it, working at night in b&w and walking lamplit streets. in other words, this man becomes a cat, able to see in the dark. take a look at the essay. i'm pretty sure you will find it fascinating.
http://www.amazon.com/Anthropologis...bs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233713083&sr=8-1
wayne
www.pbase.com/wwp
ps. for me creation is never finished, hence inventions, babies, and art. it's our job to carry it on with whatever talents and resources we have.