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: 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.
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A Photo Story: Ignitions
Andrés Gonzalez started asking questions about Portugal’s wildfires in 2023 and has not stopped since. He rides hundreds of kilometers on a motorcycle into the interior of the country while fires are still burning, sometimes arriving before emergency crews. Ignitions is not a project about flames. It is a project about the exhausting human reality…
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A Photo Story: Almost Broken
Jami Azad is a filmmaker based between Los Angeles and Karachi who photographs as therapy. Almost Broken is the work that came from years of looking for the same thing in two countries on opposite sides of the world. The face that has not yet given up. And the one that has.
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A Photo Story: Derailed
In July 2022 Dustin Mullin stopped in Green River Utah to buy groceries. The grocery store was immaculate. Fully stocked. Carefully maintained. In a town where businesses had been closing for decades someone still cared deeply enough to keep the shelves full. That detail stayed with him for four years. When he came back with…
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A Photo Story: The Uneventful City
Remon Diaz is a deaf photographer based in Miami who has spent years developing a visual grammar he calls The Decisive Metaphor. His latest analog project, The Uneventful City, is a study of the structural solitude that exists inside urban life when you strip away the noise. Literally and figuratively.