I want to talk about a blog I really like. It posts beautiful black and white photographs, one at a time, with barely a word of explanation. The photos come from all over the world — a rainy Chicago waterfront, a Nubian village on the banks of the Nile, a Roman basilica glowing with chandeliers, the streets of Washington D.C. — but they share a certain quality. They don’t try to explain themselves. They just sit there and let you look.
The blog is called Monochromia, and I have the privilege of being one of its guest contributors. I want to make that clear upfront: this is not my project. But it’s one I admire enough to write a fan letter about.
What Monochromia is
Monochromia is a collective photography blog. A community of photographers from around the world each post one image at a time — black and white, minimal words, maximum image. There’s no theme beyond the monochrome constraint. The result is something genuinely surprising: a feed that moves from a marble sculpture in a Smithsonian museum to a woman in a doorway on the Nile without a moment’s awkwardness. The common language is light and shadow, and it turns out that’s enough.
The photographers
What strikes me most is the range of voices. Marcus Puschmann, who blogs at Streets of Nuremberg, shoots documentary street photography on a Nikon Zf, with a sensitivity to available light that makes his portraits feel utterly unposed. The Northern Visions Media photographer shoots everywhere from Chicago waterfronts to wherever the day takes him, and thinks nothing of swapping his Canon 5D for an iPhone when the rain makes the decision for him — a reminder that the eye matters more than the tool. Then there are contributors who bring an entirely different sensibility: one recent post featured a marble sculpture of Lady Macbeth at the Smithsonian, shot on a Nikon Z8, with a caption that read like a short essay. Another showed the interior of a Roman basilica lit up for a wedding, processed as HDR, every column and chandelier rendered in luminous grey. And Charly Senall at charlysenall.wordpress.com brings a quieter, more contemplative eye — seascapes and landscapes where the absence of colour is the whole point.
What the constraint does
Every photographer on Monochromia has made the same fundamental decision: to remove colour from the conversation. That sounds simple, but it changes everything. Colour is generous with information — it tells you the time of day, the season, roughly where in the world you are, whether the light is artificial or natural. Strip it away and what’s left is shape, tone, texture, and the relationship between them. The viewer has to do more work. They have to actually look.
The minimal-text policy does the same thing from a different angle. Most photography online arrives inside a story — a caption, a backstory, a geotag, a mood. Monochromia offers almost none of that. Just the image and maybe a line or two. Which means the photograph either stands on its own or it doesn’t. That’s a much harder test than most of us put our own work through.
My small corner of it
I contribute the occasional image from France — film photographs mostly, from the Nikon FE or the Pentax ME Super, sometimes digital work from the Canon 6D Mark II. My most recent post was shot inside Nantes Cathedral, one of the first times I’d been back inside since the 2019 fire. It’s a small contribution to a large and genuinely international conversation, and I’m glad to be part of it.
What Monochromia has done for me personally is make me more honest about my own work. Here on IJM Photography, a good story can carry a weaker image. On Monochromia, there is no story — just the photograph. If it holds, it holds. If it doesn’t, that’s useful information too.
Go and have a look
If you enjoy black and white photography — whether you shoot it yourself or just appreciate it — Monochromia is worth bookmarking. It posts multiple times a week, the standard is consistently high, and the range of subjects and styles means there’s always something unexpected. It’s a good reminder that monochrome isn’t a retro affectation or a post-processing shortcut. It’s a distinct way of seeing the world, and there are a lot of people around the world who see it that way.