Black and White is a whole different world from the color pictures most people are familiar with. Snap a roll of dull, uninteresting pictures, drop them off at the one-hour lab, and gee, you get back colorful, uninteresting pictures.
Even a poorly composed black and white image seems to captivate the viewer; makes one look for longer than just a quick flip through the prints.
Why is black and white different?
I'm no psychiatrist; I don't pretend to understand the human mind.
On the other hand, I do know that black and white isn't as distractingly colorful as a color picture. It allows you to see what's there, rather than what the computerized printer thought that the color film might have seen.
Black and White is not as common as color, these days. It has become a specialty process; used by relics and artists more than the more common color negative films. Yet a typical black and white film is sharper and allows for more tonality than it's chromogenic counterpart, allowing more interesting images to emerge from the soup.
I'm hooked; I'd like the rest of the world to be too.
Of course, then I might have to start taking color pictures again.