Taking black and white out of photography

To the Impressionists, one of the biggest insults was to say that someone used black in their palette. I think that is a major hurdle for artists to overcome when they try to transfer painting techniques to photography and digital art. We are so used to talking about black and white photography that we forget we are talking about tones not colours. How many photographers still think that they make a photograph by setting the black and white points? If we want to reflect the look of paintings, we have to think like the original artists and remove plain white and pure black from the palette.