WHY BLACK & WHITE CHOSE ME - Finding my photography style
I didn’t choose black and white because it was timeless. I chose it because, at some point, I realized it was already mine. There was a moment when I almost threw everything away. I was in Germany, attending a workshop. I got some feedback that was brutally negative. Not constructive. Not gentle. Basically: “You don’t need to photograph this shit.”
It hit me. And on the drive home, I started questioning almost everything I had been doing. The colour grading. The images. The direction I was taking. What was I actually trying to say with my photography? So I went home and started looking through my own work. Not at what other photographers were doing. At what I had been doing. And that’s when I noticed something. Black and white had been there all along.
01 – It wasn’t a new idea
I looked back at my event photography. At older images. At the photographs I had made before I even had a clear idea of what my style was supposed to be. And again and again, I found myself drawn to the black-and-white images. They felt different. More direct. More like me. Maybe I had been searching for a style that was already sitting inside my own archive. That realization changed something.
02 – So I made a decision
I remember thinking: „Fuck it.“ I’m going to do this my way. I’m going to photograph in black and white and I’m going to risk it. Because that was the real risk. Not photographing in colour. Not following what was popular. The risk was deciding that I didn’t need to make photographs that everybody else liked. I needed to make photographs that I believed in.
03 – Black and white changed the way I saw
When colour disappears, something else becomes more important. Light. Shadow. Expression. Texture. The smallest details in someone’s face. A look. A gesture. A moment. There is less to hide behind. And I love that. Black and white doesn’t make an image simpler. Sometimes it makes it more honest.
04 – Looking back, it was one of the best decisions I made
Not because black and white is automatically better. It isn’t. But because it taught me something much more important: Your style might already exist. Sometimes you don’t have to invent it. You have to notice it. You have to trust it. And at some point, you have to be brave enough to say: „This is what I like. This is how I want to photograph. I’m doing it anyway.“
05 – Years later, I still come back to it.
Black and white became an important part of my work. It became part of my visual language. But more importantly, that decision changed the way I approach photography. It taught me to stop chasing what I thought I was supposed to be. And start paying attention to what was already there. Maybe that’s why I still love black and white so much. Because for me, it doesn’t only remove colour. It reminds me of the moment I stopped trying to look like someone else. And started trying to look like myself.
06 – Maybe I never really chose black and white.
Maybe it chose me. And sometimes I think that’s how style actually works. Not by forcing something new onto your work. But by looking closely enough to recognize what was already yours.
