The Photographers Who Shoot Only in Black and White, Still
Sebastiao Salgado spent six years photographing the world's last untouched ecosystems for his project Genesis, and he shot every frame in black and white. When asked why, he offered a characteristically direct answer: colour shows what things look like, but black and white shows what things are. In an age of hyper-saturated digital imagery, his commitment to monochrome feels like quiet defiance.
The decision to shoot exclusively in black and white in the twenty-first century is deliberate. Today's monochrome practitioners choose limitation when the full spectrum is available, and that choice shapes everything from how they see light to how they compose within the frame. Removing colour forces the eye to read tone, texture, and form.
Hiroshi Sugimoto has spent decades photographing seascapes, theatres, and architectural forms in austere black and white. His long-exposure seascapes, where water and sky blur into gradients of grey, approach pure abstraction. Sally Mann's Southern landscapes and portraits use antique large-format processes to create images that feel excavated from time.
Technically, black-and-white photography demands a different literacy. Ansel Adams' Zone System, which maps the tonal range from pure black to pure white across ten zones, remains the foundational framework for exposure and development in monochrome work. Digital photographers must learn to see in luminance values, mentally translating colour into greyscale.
The printing of black-and-white photographs is itself an art. A selenium-toned silver gelatin print from a master printer possesses a physical depth that no screen can reproduce. Printers like the late John Sexton and contemporary practitioners such as Chuck Kelton maintain darkroom traditions that transform negatives into objects of genuine beauty.
The enduring appeal of black and white may be partly neurological. Studies suggest that monochrome images engage the brain's pattern-recognition systems more actively, requiring the viewer to participate in constructing meaning. A colour photograph can be passively consumed; a black-and-white image demands interpretation.
Visit https://www.leica-oskar-barnack-award.com, which regularly honours black-and-white work. The photographers who persist with monochrome understand that sometimes the most powerful way to show the world is to subtract from it.
