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
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 a camera he had one question. What keeps people here when everything else seems to have moved on.
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.
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.
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.
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 wide.
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.
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.
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 up.
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.
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. In black and white, they told a different story.
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.
In a frozen power station on the Baltic Sea, Bernhard Brause and his partner Brigitte capture a timeless story of light, shadow, and industrial isolation.
From the tech hubs of Porto to the historic cobblestones of Lisbon, Pedro Belo’s journey is one of "wandering and waiting." In this photo story he explores why he strips away the "distraction of color" to capture the pure, unscripted essence of Lisbon’s most iconic neighborhoods.
In a dim kitchen in Costa Rica, photographer Peter Westra captured a portrait that balances darkness and redemption. His subject a writer from Devon confined indoors by illness meets the viewer’s gaze with quiet defiance. Inspired by Richard Avedon’s Beekeeper, the image transforms pain into presence, shadow into grace. It’s a testament to endurance and the healing power of light.
In the heart of Africa, work is more than a means of survival it’s an act of identity. Through environmental portraiture, Portraits of Survival captures the quiet strength of those who transform necessity into purpose.
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.