Time Magazines top 100 photos of 2025 How many are Monochrome?
Every year, TIME Magazine releases its list of the Top 100 Photos That Defined the Year. It's the visual capstone of the calendar a reminder of the chaos, the quiet moments, and the seismic events that shifted the world.
The 2025 list is powerful, raw, and full of the essential human element that TIME’s photo editors (who spend months whittling down thousands of images) always champion.
But as I scrolled through, one number hit me like a splash of cold water: Only 5 of the 100 photographs were rendered in black and white.
Five percent.
What does that tiny fraction tell us about the state of photography? And more importantly, what does it tell us about how the world sees our craft?
The History of The 100
TIME has always understood the power of a defining image. Since the yearly roundup began, it’s never been about "pretty" pictures; it’s about impact. It’s about the photo that makes you stop, read the caption, and understand the news story on a visceral level.
The selection process, overseen by a team of photo directors, favors images with:
Emotional Impact: Raw human emotion is always a key ingredient.
Narrative Clarity: The image must clearly tell a piece of the year's story.
Graphic Strength: Strong composition and visual tension, often chaotic and loud.
Historically, black and white dominated this list because, for decades, it was the only language of photojournalism. But in 2025, with only 5 out of 100, monochrome is clearly the exception, not the rule.
When Color Is the Truth
In hard hitting photojournalism, especially concerning events like the tragedies in Gaza or the political unrest across Europe, color now serves as the primary witness.
When the goal is to document reality as unequivocally as possible, color adds a layer of factual evidence that the editors likely feel is essential. The vivid red of a protester’s banner, the ochre dust of a collapsed building, the fluorescent lighting of a detention center these specific details ground the image firmly in the contemporary, unfiltered truth.
When only 5% of the year's defining images are monochrome, it suggests that B&W is being reserved for two specific uses:
To Symbolize the Timeless: The few B&W shots that make the list often feel less about a specific event on a specific day, and more about a universal condition (poverty, isolation, childhood joy).
To Emphasize Texture and Form: B&W, by removing the distraction of color, is used when the photojournalist is trying to make a statement purely with light, shadow, and geometry.
The Lesson for us
Don't be discouraged by the 5% number. See it as a challenge and a sign of our unique power.
In a world saturated with digital color, our choice to shoot in black and white is no longer a necessity, it is a conscious, creative rejection of the surface detail.
The vast majority of images are now made to grab attention with vibrant color. When we use monochrome, we are forcing the viewer to slow down, to engage with the light, and to look deeper into the composition and the emotional geometry of the moment. We are saying: "The color doesn't matter. The soul of this moment does."
So, while color wins the battle of the 100, let's keep fighting for the monochrome moment the one that, stripped bare, lasts forever.
Featured Articles
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 collaboration with his subjects. We asked him about the Yankee fan who flipped him off, then handed him twenty dollars, and why he still hunts for moments instead of waiting for them.
The Milky Way never showed. Two nights of clouds over the Vermillion Cliffs erased the whole reason for the trip. A dinner table tip about a quieter canyon and one last morning before flying home turned the loss into the shot that actually mattered.
Rain starts, fog rolls in, or the snow finally begins, and most people pack up and head for the car. That instinct is costing you the best light of the day. Here is why the messiest part of the weather is worth staying for.
A heavier week than most, worth sitting with rather than skimming past. A retired tourist has spent three months behind bars for photographing a train, Sony has made a formal offer to acquire Tamron, a group of tourists sparked real backlash for a photo shoot at Auschwitz, and a wildlife photographer documented one of the rarest sights in the ocean, alongside a new exhibition and a fresh piece of lighting gear.
Every genre we've written about so far involves pointing a camera outward, at light, at strangers, at a place. Self portraiture reverses the entire relationship. Here is why that reversal is harder than it sounds, and why it might be worth taking seriously anyway.
Every week we feature one photograph from the Collective and invite honest feedback from the community. No names attached, no backstory beyond what the photographer was trying to achieve. Just the image, open for genuine critique.
Several of the strongest photo stories we have published here happened because a photographer had someone local vouching for them. A fixer is the formal version of that relationship, and it is far more accessible than most photographers assume.
We wrote before about why committing to a project produces depth that reactive shooting almost never reaches, and promised a follow up with somewhere to actually start. Here it is, along with a real look at how one photographer's project came together one visit at a time.
David Clark has a modest summer home on a small island in Maine, and he has spent years trying not to make the average tourist photo there. When fog rolled in over the water one day, his first instinct, a diffuse sun shot, didn't jazz him at all. It was the frame he almost dismissed, a white trawler moored beside a dock, that turned into something worth the work.
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 lens Leica Q and never a plan. We asked him about storytelling over single images, the darkroom he still misses, and the piece of advice he wishes someone had given him at the start.
A Ukrainian military photographer captured the exact moment a drone strike detonated, tourists at Yellowstone risked their lives walking across a boiling hot spring for a photo, new research raises real concerns about AI editing and wildlife photography, and Godox rounds out the week with two genuinely interesting budget releases.
Alex spent a week trying to find the right words, the right approach, the right script for asking a stranger to be photographed. None of it worked until Alex stopped trying to find the right words at all.
So many photographers use the word right there in their social media bio. Amateur. It's meant as a disclaimer, a way of managing expectations before the images even speak for themselves. The word was never supposed to carry that weight, and neither should you.
We already wrote about the noise inside your head, the kind that keeps you from seeing anything worth photographing in the first place. This is about the other noise. The kind sitting right there in the frame, competing with your subject for the exact same attention you're asking a viewer to give it.
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.
A genuinely rich week. We lost a pioneering photojournalist, a Dorothea Lange archive has been made public for the first time, a photographer is suing a well known artist over alleged image appropriation, and a new biography uncovers a photographer whose second career was espionage.
Long before anyone pointed a camera at a face, painters were solving the exact problem every portrait photographer still faces. How do you make a flat surface hold the weight and depth of a real human face using nothing but light and shadow. Rembrandt solved it so well that photographers are still using his name for it.
Rakesh Subramanian doesn't remember which book first put the Bolivian salt flats in his head. He just remembers the feeling, and how many years he carried it before his wife's fortieth birthday finally made the trip real. He injured his back crossing the border, felt the altitude at nearly sixteen thousand feet, and walked out into it anyway, both cameras in hand, every single time they stopped.
Alex fixed the thing that went wrong in the alley, off center placement, real negative space, a frame that finally had somewhere for the eye to breathe. It worked. Then Alex tried something the camera couldn't help with at all, walking up to a stranger and asking for a portrait. That didn't go nearly as well.
Almost every photographer eventually picks up a label. Street photographer. Landscape photographer. Portrait photographer. There's nothing wrong with that. The label isn't the problem. What it quietly turns into, if you're not paying attention, is.
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 Ricoh GRIII, and he is trying to push his work toward something with more documentary weight. We asked him about all of it.
Every week we feature one photograph from the Collective and invite honest feedback from the community. No names attached, no backstory beyond what the photographer was trying to achieve. Just the image, open for genuine critique.
Every photographer has a piece of advice they were given once, believed completely, and eventually had to unlearn the hard way. We rounded up some of the classics. Now we want to hear one from you.
A genuinely substantial week. Ricoh marks 30 years of the original GR1 with a special edition GR IV, freelance photojournalists are pushing back hard on a new Wall Street Journal contract, a rare gangster photography series gets its due, and a veteran street photographer makes the case for why the genre matters more now than ever.
Every week we feature one photograph from the Collective and invite honest feedback from the community. No names attached, no backstory beyond what the photographer was trying to achieve. Just the image, open for genuine critique.
Avoid midday sun. Wait for golden hour. It's one of the first rules every photographer learns, usually before they've even figured out what aperture does. The observation behind it is real. The rule it turned into might be costing you some of the strongest light you'll ever get.
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.
Alexander Grubl and a friend showed up to the US Capitol with no ticket, no plan, and one honest answer to a Capitol Police officer. We're from Austria, we don't have a congressman. That answer got them a Special Visitor Pass, a walk through the Rotunda, and eventually a wrong turn straight into the office of the Majority Leader.
There's a idea floating around photography circles right now, substantive images good, performative images bad, as if the two are opposites and you have to pick a side. We don't buy it. A photograph needs something true underneath it, and it needs the craft to actually deliver that truth to someone looking at it. One without the other doesn't work.
The Monochrome Collective
Darren Pellegrino is a working photographer and the founder of The Monochrome Collective. He believes that black and white photography is not a style, it is a discipline. One that forces you to see light, shadow, and composition with absolute clarity. The Monochrome Collective was built for photographers who share that obsession and who are ready to trade the algorithm for real creative connection.
Most photographs put the viewer on the outside, looking in, the way you might look through a window at something happening on the other side of the glass. Some photographs do something different. They collapse that distance completely. Here is how to make your images do that.