Behind The Shot
ONE PHOTOGRAPHER. ONE IMAGE. THE STORY BEHIND THE SHOT.
Every photograph has a moment before the moment. The decision to stop. The instinct to raise the camera. The fraction of a second between seeing something and committing to it.
Behind the Shot goes there. Each piece takes a single black and white photograph and unpacks it completely. The location, the light, the camera settings, the thought process. What the photographer saw, what they were hoping for, and what they actually got. Not a tutorial. Not a gear review. A window into the mind of someone making a deliberate monochrome image.
If you have a photograph you would like to submit for Behind the Shot, we would love to hear from you. Email us at dp@themonochromecollective.co
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Behind The Shot With Neil McShane
Neil McShane made this photograph from a bench in his front garden in 2022, while recovering from sepsis with a Fuji X-T20 and three old Zuiko lenses. The project changed what he photographs.
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Behind The Shot With Jasper Bancroft
A figure appears in the mist at the Osaka Expo, caught on a Leica M3 loaded with Ilford Delta 3200. Jasper Bancroft on waiting twenty minutes, taking a single frame, and wanting a form rather than a person.
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Behind The Shot With Mark Archibald
Mark Archibald had long kept a quarter mile gravel road in mind as a good sunset vantage point over an Amish farm near his home. When near whiteout conditions hit instead, wind whipping snow until sky and farmland became indistinguishable, he drove out before the roads got too bad, hoping a photograph could actually convey…
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Behind The Shot With Michael Houghton
Michael Houghton and his wife fell in love with the Isle of Harris on their first visit in 2015 and have returned most years since. A midwinter fortnight with only a couple of hours of rain, practically unheard of that far north in January, gave him a cold bright morning at low tide, marram grass…
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Behind The Shot With Flora van Wageningen
Flora van Wageningen took a solo weekend to the mountains during a genuinely low point in her life, expecting nothing more than dull, dreary weather. Walking the shoreline of Lake Minnewanka in falling snow, she found a diving platform still anchored out in the lake, alone in a sea of white. It mirrored exactly how…
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Behind The Shot With Mark Archibald
Mark Archibald bought six acres of fallow farmland twenty five years ago and spent decades planting trees, scattering acorns on walks, and letting the land slowly return to woods. Now deer come close enough to photograph from his own sunroom, camo netting hung over open sliding doors, waiting for a fawn to wander through the…
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Behind The Shot With Rakesh Subramanian
The Milky Way never showed. Two nights of clouds over the Vermillion Cliffs erased the whole reason for the trip. A dinner table tip about a quieter canyon and one last morning before flying home turned the loss into the shot that actually mattered.
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Behind The Shot With Rakesh Subramanian
Rakesh Subramanian doesn’t remember which book first put the Bolivian salt flats in his head. He just remembers the feeling, and how many years he carried it before his wife’s fortieth birthday finally made the trip real. He injured his back crossing the border, felt the altitude at nearly sixteen thousand feet, and walked out…
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Behind The Shot With Alexander Grubl
Alexander Grubl and a friend showed up to the US Capitol with no ticket, no plan, and one honest answer to a Capitol Police officer. We’re from Austria, we don’t have a congressman. That answer got them a Special Visitor Pass, a walk through the Rotunda, and eventually a wrong turn straight into the office…