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Four years in the past, I set myself what I believed was a easy photographic problem: to shoot solely in black and white for a 12 months.
No colour movie, no colour digital work, no “just in case” variations sitting on a tough drive ready to be edited later. Just monochrome, in each sense of the phrase, each digitally and on movie.
At the time, I thought it might sharpen my eye, discipline my approach, and perhaps teach me something about light, form, and composition that color had allowed me to overlook. What I did not expect was that four years later, I would still be here, still shooting in black and white, still enjoying every second of it, and with very little desire to go back.
That may sound strange to some, especially when photography is so often tied to the richness of color. A sunset burning across the sky, a sea turned deep turquoise by the light, the warmth of autumn, the neon glow of a city at night – these are all things photographers are supposed to want to capture.
Yet one of the greatest gifts black and white photography has given me is the ability to appreciate those moments without feeling the need to photograph them. I can now watch a wonderful sunset and simply enjoy it. I can look at a powerfully colored sea and store it in my mind, rather than instinctively reaching for a camera.
In many ways, that has been one of the most freeing parts of the whole experience. Choosing black and white has not made me blind to color; if anything, it has made me more aware of it. The difference is that I no longer feel compelled to translate every beautiful color moment into a photograph. Some things are better left as memories, held privately, exactly as they were seen.
The magic of black and white photography, for me, is that it is not what the eye truly sees. It removes a layer of information that we rely on every day, and in doing so, it opens a door into a slightly different dimension of reality. Without color, the ordinary can become strange, the mundane can become important, and life’s everyday moments can be seen for what they often are: honest, simple, and quietly extraordinary.
That is where black and white have changed the way I look at the world. It strips things back. It asks more from the photographer and, I think, more from the viewer too. You are no longer being guided by a bright red coat, a blue sky, or the golden tone of late afternoon light. Instead, you are left with gesture, shadow, texture, shape, expression, and feeling. The image has to stand on those things alone.
There is something deeply emotional about that process. You can take a colorful landscape, remove the color entirely, and suddenly the same scene tells a completely different story. What was once beautiful in an obvious way can become lonely, dramatic, peaceful, or even unsettling. Black and white allows you to see past what is physically there and, like a painter, apply your own vision to the scene.
I fully admit that I also buy into the great cliché of black and white being “timeless.” It is a well-worn phrase, but that does not make it any less true. You can shoot a set of images in 2026 and, depending on the subject, the light, and the treatment, they can feel as though they belong to 1926. That is not just nostalgia; it is a creative tool. It allows a photographer to blur time, to remove certain modern distractions, and to tell a story in a way that feels less tied to the moment it was made.
For me, black and white has become a kind of poetic caption for the color moment I remember in my head. The color may not be present in the final photograph, but it still exists somewhere in the making of it. I remember the warmth of the light, the shade of the sea, the color of the coat, the tone of the sky. The viewer may not see those things, but somehow the emotion of them can still live inside the image.
That, I think, is one of the most fascinating things about monochrome photography. You can remove the color from the frame, but you cannot always remove it from the mind. The brain fills in gaps, imagines tones, and builds its own version of what might have been there. Black and white gives just enough information, then lets memory and imagination do the rest.
What began as an experiment has now become part of how I see. I no longer think of black and white as a limitation, but as a language. It is not about rejecting color because color is somehow lesser.
It is about choosing a different way of speaking. It is about simplifying the frame until what remains feels closer to the truth I wanted to express.
Will I ever go back to shooting color? Honestly, I am not sure. This little one-year challenge has lasted far longer than I ever expected, and perhaps that says everything. Four years on, I still find joy in it. I still find new things to learn. I still find myself surprised by how different the world can look when color is taken away.
Maybe one day color will call me back in some serious way, but for now, I am more than happy where I am. Black and white has given me a way to photograph the world without feeling the need to possess all of it.
It has taught me to look harder, feel more, and sometimes, when the sunset is too beautiful for words, simply put the camera down and remember it.
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