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: 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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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.
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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.