"Color photography only became practical in the mid-1950s after film manufacturers had invented processes that made color pictures sufficiently easy to develop. It was another technological shift to change the medium, just as the portable camera and film before. And perhaps inevitably, photographers now assumed the role that the defenders of painting had before them: They refused to embrace the new technology...
Why would Cartier-Bresson dismiss color so forthrightly? Most likely because black and white works so differently than color does.
Subjects that look great in black and white often don’t look good in color. It’s for the same reason that vivid color pictures look boring once desaturated. Images in the photo-historical cannon were made for one palette or another. One sees and shoots in the same color or B&W of your camera film or sensors...
In the black and white years, being a photographer had meant developing your own film, cropping pictures, and making prints. Processing color photographs, in contrast, was too complicated for many professional photographers — but lent itself perfectly to amateurs, who simply had their photos developed in a lab."
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