Photographer Spotlight
THE PHOTOGRAPHERS BEHIND THE MONOCHROME IMAGES.
There is no shortage of black and white photography on the internet. What is harder to find is the person behind it. The way they think. The reason they shoot the way they shoot. The influences that shaped them and the questions they are still trying to answer.
Photographer Spotlights goes behind the lens. Each piece is a full interview with a black and white photographer from somewhere in the world. We ask about their process, their gear, their influences and their work. A conversation with someone who has something worth saying about monochrome photography.
If you are a black and white photographer and would like to be featured in a Photographer Spotlight, we would love to hear from you. Email us at dp@themonochromecollective.co
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Photographer Spotlight: Kayleigh Morin
Kayleigh Morin started as an artist frustrated that drawing could not capture light the way she wanted. Self portraits led to photographing others, and a lifelong love of fashion pulled her toward it as a genre. Her black and white work leans into high contrast, a deliberate choice she says mirrors her own emotional range.…
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Photographer Spotlight: Leighton Phillips
Leighton Phillips describes his work as Urban Still Life, drawn to the mundane, the ignored, and the visually familiar rather than anything conventionally beautiful. His black and white style emerged gradually, shaped by a belief that removing color lets light and tone carry the emotional weight of a scene. We asked him about a dying…
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Photographer Spotlight: Flora van Wageningen
Flora van Wageningen picked up a camera in her late thirties, restless and bored with the city she had settled in, and gave herself five years to master the craft and see her surroundings differently. She keeps returning to landscape and abstract work, and lately she has been questioning whether astrophotography needs color at all,…
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Photographer Spotlight: Damian Ward
Damian Ward is drawn to woodland and solitary trees, especially in winter when the branches are bare, in a landscape he describes as beautiful but not dramatic. He shoots almost entirely with vintage manual focus lenses, sets his camera to black and white before he ever presses the shutter, and rarely touches a RAW file.…
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Photographer Spotlight: Edward Boches
Edward Boches was pulled into photography by John Filo’s 1970 image of a woman kneeling over Jeffrey Miller at Kent State, the entire story of a moment held in a single frame. He has spent his career chasing that same rawness, documenting amateur boxers, oyster farmers, Boston’s homeless community, and neighborhoods in transition, always in…
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Photographer Spotlight: Andrew Griffiths
Andrew Griffiths has been photographing since he was four or five years old, carrying a bakelite Brownie camera through the Pennine hills long before his mother ever bothered loading it with film. He shoots the whole river catchment now, from moorland headwaters down to the crowded center of Manchester, almost always with a single fixed…
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Photographer Spotlight: Onni Laine
Onni Laine found his direction in Japan in 2024 after years of shooting without a real purpose. What he found there was streets that feel slightly oppressive, slightly paranoia inducing, and a growing dissatisfaction with the silhouettes and clever reflections that street photography tends to reward too easily. He shoots ninety percent spontaneously with a…
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Photographer Spotlight: Lori Naumes
Lori Naumes got into photography because of encouragement, not obsession, feedback on social media, family cheering her on, and a decision to buy a “real” camera and give it a shot. Now she photographs people, emotion, and the quiet stories between them, favoring a zoom lens precisely so she can observe rather than stage. We…
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Photographer Spotlight: Lee Griffith
Lee Griffith started developing film in a shed with duct taped light leaks and chemistry stored in bottles his mortician gave him. Decades and a near-death experience later, he still shoots ninety five percent spontaneously, rotates through Polaroids and Hasselblads depending on how his hand feels in the dry cabinet, and credits a small town…