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Another difficulty for young photographers who might try to work in b/w is the widespread lack of advanced training in darkroom technique. Where do they go to learn? But I think your question is mainly about the difficulties of using b/w as a viable modern medium now that color has been unleashed everywhere. It's true when I was growing up the television screens were b/w and the newspaper photos were in b/w. Now our television screens and computer monitors are all in color, ones often poorly calibrated for color. What are all these screwy screens doing to our eyes, to our ability to see and feel color? Strangely tinted sunglasses are ubiquitous and we hardly consider the effects of our artificial lighting. I wonder if we aren't becoming a bit numb to the colors around us. Are we experiencing the colors in the world as vividly and pleasurably as our ancestors?
To get to your question - b/w photography is wonderful and can still be done. If b/w feels right for a young photographer, if it's for some reason more thrilling to work in b/w than in color then why not? That photographer should give him or herself permission to go ahead in b/w and not be limited by some limiting belief. The glory of the first 150 years of photography is overwhelmingly in b/w and a b/w photographer today can perhaps more successfully refer to that work of the past. I find the continuity among images, the flow, to usually (but not always) be more satisfying and thought-out in a book of b/w photos than in a book comprised of color images. If you study b/w films cut by cut you can see all sorts of care in linking up one image after another. The color films of the past few decades tend to depend on a rather passive, beaten-down audience, one that seems hardly aware of when a cut is taking place.
