There is great artistic merit in black and white, no doubt, especially if the photographer chose it during a time when color was available. Those guys know what they were doing.
But what if it's a standard news or candid shot that would have looked amazing in color, but now looks shit in black and white? For me, the thing I like is the historical photos get surprisingly humanized for me with color. I would never have realized it until I saw it differently, but the black and white (apparently) lends it a sense of "not really us." That's often the purposeful effect of an artistic photographer, but it can also lend a sense of "not really relevant" to today, which is decidedly not the point of a documentary news photographer.
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