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 Lindsay Brice
Lindsay Brice timed her visit for 8am specifically so no one would be loitering under the sign that told them not to. Then two men on the corner told her the liquor store wasn’t a liquor store at all, it was a club, and led her through an upholstered door into a room where the…
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Behind The Shot With Colin Cunningham
Two unrelated photo challenges and a joke about Lord Cardigan brought John in front of the camera for one of the only portraits ever made of him. Four frames at a dining table in natural light. Weeks later he was gone, and the photograph became something neither of them could have known it would be.
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Behind The Shot With Glen Fisher
Glen Fisher went to Assynt in the far north-west of Scotland for a photography workshop with one goal. To come away with three photographs just a level or two higher than anything he had made before. On a grey morning with no sun and clouds hanging low over the hills he stood in the cold…
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Behind The Shot With Neil Silk
Neil Silk’s wife gave him tickets to see Joe Bonamassa at the Royal Albert Hall for Christmas 2023. No professional gear was allowed so he brought a £50 Canon compact he had picked up secondhand. Security laughed. His phone would have been worse. Back at the hotel that night scrolling through blurry unusable frames his…
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Behind The Shot With Phil Anker
Phil Anker always takes in Salisbury Cathedral on his photo walks because of what the light does in the cloisters at different times of day. One afternoon a man sat on a corner wall with beautiful light falling on him and Phil sat down on the low wall opposite, opened his flip screen, and waited.…
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Behind The Shot With Shane Guidaboni
Shane Guidaboni was riding the 66 bus through Brookline in 2015 when he noticed a mother asleep across the aisle, one daughter out cold on her lap, the other wide awake and quietly going through her purse. He had no camera. He had an iPhone 6s and about thirty seconds of soft afternoon light coming…
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Behind The Shot With Thomas Hren
It started with a used photography book and an invitation for coffee. By the end of the conversation Claudia had shared something she rarely told anyone. A few days later she was standing in a studio. What happened between them that day is what true portrait photography looks like when it is done with honesty,…
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Behind The Shot With Tamas Kereskenyi
For nearly twenty years Tamas Kereskenyi could not walk through this square without feeling the weight of it. Anger. Helplessness. The suffocating atmosphere of a political reality that had frozen the place into a symbol of absolute power. Then history changed. He came back for the first time not as a protestor but as a…
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Behind The Shot With Peggy Becker
Peggy Becker walked into a salt marsh on Martha’s Vineyard one early morning carrying her camera and a heavy heart. She was thinking about rising seas and a warming world. Then she found a spider’s web in the last of the light and everything shifted.