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
-
A Photo Story: While I’m Working
Every working photographer has a hard drive full of images that did not fit the brief. Ben Lumley decided to do something about it. Photos While I’m Working is the series he built from a decade of moments nobody commissioned and nobody asked for. It might be his most honest work.
-
A Photo Story: The Island That Taught Me to See People
David Clark retired three years ago and bought his first serious camera. Since then he has been making up for lost time. A week in Havana on a portrait workshop led by legendary photographer Peter Turnley changed how he thinks about photographing people. Here is the story.
-
A Photo Story: The Block
For the past several months Joe Moro has been returning two or three times a week to the same corner in Melbourne. The same stretch of footpath. The same light. The same cast of strangers who are slowly becoming familiar. This is what it looks like when a photographer decides to go deep instead of…
-
A Photo Story: Dancing With Bears
Every December in the Moldavian region of Romania, men wrap themselves in real bear skins and march through the streets to the sound of drums. Armin traveled from Germany to document it. He did not expect to find himself there too.
-
A Photo Story: Built on Ashes
Oxford, Mississippi is a town in the middle of remaking itself. Dason Pettit has spent years watching it happen, and somewhere along the way realized the project was also about him.
-
A Photo Story: Cuba 25 Years Ago
Twenty five years ago, Eduardo Cerda Sanchez boarded a plane to Cuba. He was not going as a photographer with a project. He was going as a student, with a camera, three months, and no agenda. Cuba, it turns out, does not need a photographer with a project. It just needs one willing to show…
-
A Photo Story: Into the Cold
For over a century, Milwaukeeans have started their new year the hard way. André Saint Louis has spent the last four years documenting the chaos, the cold, and the characters who keep coming back.
-
A Photo Story: What the North Asks of You
There is a particular kind of photograph that does not reveal itself immediately. You make it, file it away, move on. Years pass. Then one day you return to it and something has changed, not in the image, but in you. Flora van Wageningen returned to her Faroe Islands photographs seven years after making them.…
-
A Photo Story: Ten Days Ten Shadows
Ten days. Ten images. One singular pursuit of light. This series explores the quiet drama of Mexico’s streets and the power of finding the “main character” within the shadows.