Black and White Photography Stories
Real photographers. Real projects. The stories behind the black and white images.
Black and white photography is not just about the image. It is about what led to it. The place, the decision, the moment before the shutter opened. The story that made the photograph possible in the first place.
This is where we go deeper. Each piece profiles a black and white photographer and a project, told in their own words and shaped into something worth reading. Street photography in Havana. A polar bear plunge in Milwaukee. Ten days of shadows. A week in the Faroe Islands. These are not portfolios. They are honest accounts of what it actually means to go out and make monochrome photographs.
If you have a black and white photography project you would like to share with our community, we would love to hear from you. Email us at dp@themonochromecollective.co
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A Photo Story: The First City in the Americas
Adam Arenas went to Santo Domingo without a camera, came back with a Ricoh and a reason to return. His account of the Zona Colonial, in his own words, and why the old stone kept pulling him to black and white.
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A Photo Story: Nobody Is Looking at the View
Flavia Silva walked the port district of Rio de Janeiro on a gray July Wednesday and came home with twelve pictures in which nobody is looking at the view.
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A Photo Story: Seventy Voices, Twenty Six Recorded
Bojan Fürst set out to profile seventy Newfoundlanders and Labradorians for the seventieth anniversary of the province joining Canada. He finished twenty six before the pandemic stopped him, and he wants to finish the rest.
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A Photo Story: The Masks That Scared Him as a Boy
Ajay Lalu stopped at the Kaapse Klopse on his way home from a photo walk. Three years later, after earning his way into the rehearsals, workshops and homes behind the parade, the work became a book.
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A Photo Story: What Thirty Eight Years as a Rabbi Taught Him to Notice
A retired rabbi turned street photographer stumbled onto a Brooklyn Chabad camp trip on a ferry to Governors Island. What he found was less about religious difference and more about what a hundred kids look like on a field trip.
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A Photo Story: One Camera One Lens One Family Holiday
Rob Sutherland is a commercial and landscape photographer who has shot a photo a day for sixteen years. On a family trip to Iceland he had to figure out, in real time, how to be fully present as a father while still making meaningful photographs. Here is how he actually did it.
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A Photo Story: A Feud, a Friendship, and a Clock
Ty Nelson picked up a camera because he loved wrestling, and started shooting the action the way most beginners do. What he found instead, over years of showing up to a banquet hall in Joliet, was something closer to a long running story he was quietly documenting one show at a time. This is the…
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A Photo Story: The Music Never Stops
Kenneth Nelson had one goal on June 26, 2004. Document the Mermaid Parade. Then the music found him first, and it never really let go. Eighteen years and more than six thousand photographs later, he is still trying to figure out which single face captures what happens on that boardwalk.
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A Photo Story: What the Wood Knows
Andre Vallgren spent a day photographing a Swedish luthier who has built guitars for Keith Richards and Ryan Adams. What he found was less about the instruments and more about the man building them.