Students in introductory painting classes are typically instructed not to use black, as it flattens the composition. Browns, blues and heavily darkened versions of any other color create depth through shading, but the eye sees black as nothing, and nothing is a plane. Absence, by definition, is the absence of dimension. It’s satisfying to know that art schools will continue to produce versatile metaphors long after they’ve stopped producing artists, but this particular truism of painting has lived through the invention of its own counterexample in the black and white photograph.