A Fan Letter to Monochromia

Posted on July 17, 2026July 8, 2026 Posted in Black and White Photography, France, photography philosophyTagged black and white film photography, Black and White Photography, Canon 6d Mark II, Film Photography, film photography blog, film photography community, French photography blog, ilford hp5, Ilford HP5 Plus, Loire Atlantique, monochrome, Monochromia, nantes cathedral, Nikon FE, Pentax ME SUper, photography journal, Street Photography8 Comments

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.

Nubian woman in a doorway, Upper Egypt, Nikon Zf — *Silent Observations* — a Nubian village on the Nile, Upper Egypt. Nikon Zf, 200mm. By Marcus Puschmann / Streets of Nuremberg. On Monochromia.

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.

Chicago waterfront on a rainy day, iPhone 16 Pro — *Tethered* — Chicago waterfront on a rainy day. iPhone 16 Pro. By Northern Visions Media. On Monochromia.

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.

Lady Macbeth marble sculpture, Smithsonian American Art Museum — *Out, Damnet Spot* — Lady Macbeth by Elisabet Ney, 1905. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. Nikon Z8, 135mm. On Monochromia.

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.

Nantes Cathedral interior, Nikon FE, Ilford HP5+ — *Nantes Cathedral* — Nikon FE, Ilford HP5+. One of my first shots inside since the 2019 fire. On Monochromia.

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.

monochromia.blog

On the Way Home

Posted on July 10, 2026June 26, 2026 Posted in France, Landscape Photography, Travel photography, VendéeTagged Fujifilm X Series, golden hour, Helios 44-2 58mm f2, helios M44-2, landscape photography France, Pays de la Loire, photography journal, swirly bokeh, Vendée, Vendée photography2 Comments

There is a particular skill in noticing things on a drive and then actually stopping to do something about them. I have this skill approximately twice a year, if conditions are right and there is a camera on the passenger seat.

My daughter needed dropping off. Her friend too. They were going to watch someone play something somewhere in the north of the Vendée: I did not ask many questions, which is apparently the correct posture at this stage of parenting. I dropped them off, pointed the car back towards home, and drove past the same fields I had been quietly registering for weeks.

I had first noticed them whilst out with my son: flat, wide, open, the kind of agricultural landscape you pass through on the way to somewhere else. The north of the Vendée is not the Vendée most people expect. There are no bocage hedgerows here, no hills doing anything dramatic. It is cereal crops and telegraph poles and sky, and in the right light it holds very still, as if it knows something you don’t.

Each time I had driven through it I had thought: I should stop here. Each time, I had not stopped.

This time the X-T2 was on the passenger seat with the Helios 44-2 on the front of it. The Helios is a Soviet-era 58mm lens with a reputation for doing interesting things with light that is not pointed directly at it: a slight warmth, a softness at the edges, a quality that sits somewhere between documentation and memory. It is not the lens you reach for when precision is the priority. It is the lens you reach for when you are not entirely sure what you want but you suspect something is there.

I pulled over. I was in the field for under half an hour.

The wheat was at that transitional point between green and gold: not yet fully dried through, some stalks still holding their earlier colour while others had already given up on it. The light was coming in low and flat from the west, doing what late evening light in June does when it decides to cooperate; which is to say, it was doing most of the work for me.

What I kept returning to were the telegraph poles. There is one in particular that appears in several of the frames: a single upright in an otherwise uninterrupted field, placed there at some point for entirely practical reasons by someone who was not thinking about photographs. You notice the geometry of it. The wires pulling away at angles. The fact that the land is so flat and the sky is so blank that the pole reads almost as a deliberate placement; a decision rather than an accident.

I spent some time at the field edges, where the cultivated gives way to the accidental. The daisies there were doing well. They grow in at the margins of the wheat, small and white and backlit, and they are the kind of foreground detail that would look arranged if you had arranged it. I shot some of them flat to the ground, the X-T2’s tilting screen earning its keep in a way that my knees were grateful for.

There is a young corn seedling in one of the frames: a single green plant in dry, pale earth, with a long row of its identical companions stretching away behind it into blur. I cannot give you a strong editorial reason for having taken that photograph. I took it anyway. Sometimes the thing that catches the eye simply catches the eye, and you either commit to it or you don’t.

The last frames were the closest: individual wheat ears, the small bristles of grain, the way the Helios renders the background when you are that close. There is a version of that shot that is technically not what I would call an achievement. There is another version where the light is doing something I did not entirely plan and the grain looks less like grain and more like the idea of it.

I prefer the second version, which is convenient because that is the one I came home with.

I was back before dark. My daughter was collected later, still pleasantly vague about the exact nature of what she had watched.

Half an hour in a field in the north of the Vendée. I should probably stop more often.

Golden wheat field at sunset with lone telegraph pole, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée France

Wheat field with distant tree line and telegraph poles in golden evening light, Fujifilm X-T2, north Vendée

Large square hay bale against dark trees with wildflowers in foreground, golden hour, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2 north Vendée

Backlit white daisies at wheat field edge, hay bale blurred in background, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée

Wild daisies and grass in golden evening light with wheat field behind, Fujifilm X-T2, north Vendée France

Wide wheat field at golden hour with distant farmhouse and tree line, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, Vendée France

Single young corn seedling in dry pale earth with row of plants blurred behind, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, Vendée

Wheat field in portrait orientation with blurred tree line behind, Helios 44-2 bokeh, Fujifilm X-T2, north Vendée

Close-up wheat ears in golden backlit evening light, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2 58mm, north Vendée France

Wheat ears filling frame in warm amber evening light, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée France June 2026

Close detail of wheat ears in warm evening light, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée France

Wheat stalks at field edge in golden evening light, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée

Single wheat ear in sharp focus with swirly Helios 44-2 bokeh background, Fujifilm X-T2, north Vendée France

Green roadside grass in warm golden side-lighting at field edge, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée France

Narrow country lane with hedgerows and golden field, warm painterly tones, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée

Wild daisies in foreground with golden wheat field and tree line behind, Fujifilm X-T2, north Vendée France

Wide wheat field with telegraph pole under hazy amber sky, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, north Vendée France

Vast flat wheat field at dusk with telegraph pole and power lines under peach sky, Fujifilm X-T2 Helios 44-2, Vendée

La Rabatelière: Month of Our Lady

Posted on June 5, 2026July 9, 2026 Posted in Architecture, Black and White Photography, Catholic, Film Photography, France, Landscape Photography, ReportageTagged 35mm film, Abbé Hillairet, analog photography, apparition of La Salette, Balades et Patrimoine, Black and White Photography, canon AE1 program, Canon AE1 Program photography, Catholic Pilgrimage, church photography, colonnes infernales, devoir de mémoire, Film Photography, Fomapan 100, France, French photography, heritage photography, La Rabatelière, Marian apparitions, May devotions, Month of Our Lady, Our Lady of La Salette, photography journal, pilgrimage photography, porte des Inventaires, Saint-Charles church La Rabatelière, Sanctuaire de la Salette, travel photography France, Vendée, Vendée history, Vendée photography, War of the VendéeLeave a comment

Canon AE1 Program | Fomapan 100

If you’ve read the Lourdes articles, you’ll know that I have a particular devotion to Our Lady and to the sites of her apparitions. So when May 1st came around — the first day of the Month of Our Lady — it seemed only right to do something about it.

Out with the Canon AE1 Program, loaded with a roll of Fomapan 100. Destination: La Rabatelière, about twenty minutes from the house, and the Sanctuaire de la Salette.

I said my Rosary in the car on the way over. Stopped off at the Parish Church of Saint-Charles and said an extra decade. Well, it’s the Month of Mary. Start as you mean to go on.

The French say: En avril, ne te découvre pas d’un fil. Don’t shed a thread of clothing in April. It was May now and 26°c. The Panama hat was already feeling like too much. Shirt sleeves it was.

I’ve been to La Rabatelière before, about twenty years ago, but I hadn’t really taken it in properly. This time I wanted to do it right.

The Parish Church of Saint-Charles is where you begin. It was built in 1633, consecrated the following year on the feast of Saint Charles; that coincidence of date gave the church its name and its patron. A solid, unshowy building — what the heritage plaques call style bas-breton: a massive façade, plain and purposeful. Exactly the kind of church that says: we are here, and we intend to stay.

Except, of course, they tried to burn it down.

On 8 December 1793, during the War of the Vendée, Republican forces put the church to the torch. For those who don’t know the War of the Vendée: it was the uprising of the western provinces against the Revolution, and the Republic’s response was one of the darkest episodes in French history. The colonnes infernales — the Infernal Columns — swept through this region killing civilians, burning farms, destroying everything they found. Here in the Vendée, people carry a devoir de mémoire, a duty of remembrance. They do not forget.

The church was restored in 1802. A century later, Abbé Hillairet enlarged it; he added a transept to give it the shape of a Latin cross.

Then, in 1905, came the Law on the Separation of Church and State. All Church property was to be inventoried by the state. For a lot of French Catholics, this was not a bureaucratic inconvenience. It was another assault. The Revolution had burned the church down. Now the Republic wanted a list of everything inside it.

In February 1906, word went around La Rabatelière that the inspectors were coming. The parishioners didn’t wait. They dragged tree trunks in front of the doors. When the inspectors arrived, they found the church barricaded and the congregation inside with their priest, refusing to move.

It held. For a while.

On 23 November 1906, they came back with axes. The left side door — the one on the north side of the nave — was broken open. You can still see the marks. Deep ones. Not the kind of thing that weathers away or gets sanded smooth. They are still there because nobody has chosen to remove them. La porte des Inventaires. That is what the door has been called ever since. The Inventory Door. Not a nickname that flatters the Republic.

I stood in front of it and thought: a hundred and twenty years, and there are the marks. The Vendée does not forget. It does not perform forgetting either.

Before heading up the hill I walked through the cemetery, which the municipal council reorganised around 1970. Near the entrance sits a small millstone, on display. It was found in a tomb believed to belong to François Suire (1753-1794): a miller, killed by Republican soldiers during the War of the Vendée. Forty-one years old. Nobody famous. No monument beyond this stone. But there it is. Still there.

Near the central cross is the granite tomb of Abbé Elie Hillairet (1840-1908), the parish priest here from 1873 until his death. He is, as we’ll see, the man behind most of what you can still see in this village. It seems fitting that he is buried at the foot of his life’s work.

Then the climb.

The Sanctuaire de la Salette sits on a hillside above the Petite Maine river, and I can confirm: it is a bit hilly. There were signs for the handicapped route but I couldn’t make head nor tail of them. My legs were killing me by the time I reached the top.

For those who are less familiar with the apparitions of Our Lady: La Salette is one of the great Marian apparitions, confirmed by the Church in 1851. On 19 September 1846, on a mountainside near Corps in the French Alps, two young shepherds encountered a weeping woman seated on a stone. Her name: Mélanie Calvat, aged fourteen; and Maximin Giraud, aged eleven. The woman rose and spoke to them: about faith, about the breaking of Sunday rest, about blasphemy, about a people drifting from God. She gave each child a secret. Then she ascended into the light and was gone.

As apparitions go, La Salette has always struck me as a sorrowful one. Our Lady of Lourdes is serene; you see her in her grotto and feel peace. Our Lady of La Salette is weeping. She comes as a mother at the end of her patience, and her message is a warning. But it is still love. Only love would bother.

Hillairet understood this. He was curé here from 1873 to 1908, and he built this sanctuary as an act of deliberate faith during the most aggressively anticlerical period in French history. The Republic was dismantling the Church’s presence everywhere it could reach. Hillairet planted statues on a hillside.

Work began in 1887. Three groups of statues marking the three moments of the apparition were inaugurated the following summer. A Rosary monument came next. The path climbs to a tower: the Triumph of the Cross. At the summit, the Chapel of the Cross of Jerusalem, a square keep in local schist and brick, built in 1893. A Stations of the Cross path added along the hillside in 1902.

Standing up there, looking out over the valley, I thought about the miller buried down in the cemetery. And the axe marks in the church door. And Hillairet up here, building all of this in the teeth of a state that wanted nothing to do with it.

The Vendée has its wounds. It tends them carefully.

I am officially knackered. The Fomapan went through fine. The Panama hat stayed in the bag.

I drove home with the windows down, thinking that May 1st had been rather well spent.

All photographs shot on Fomapan 100, Canon AE1 Program. La Rabatelière, Vendée, May 2026.