Black and white photography has always whispered to me. It’s subtle. Unapologetically quiet. But when done right, it roars—without ever raising its voice.
For years, I’ve been drawn to photographing in low light. There’s something honest about it. No theatrics, no frills. Just what is. But I didn’t always know how to make those images speak. I’d shoot them because I felt something, but it took time—and a lot of mistakes—before I learned how to let the shadows tell the story.
Black and white is, without question, the hardest medium I work in. In color photography, you can lean on light, tone, mood, and color theory to carry an image. Color can fill in the emotional gaps when the subject isn’t fully doing the heavy lifting. But in black and white? The subject has to speak. Loudly. Without distraction.
That’s where things get real.
It forces me to be brutally intentional. If the image isn’t about something—if it doesn’t feel like something—then it falls flat. There’s no hiding in monochrome. The light, the line, the subject, the pause between breath and gesture—every detail either works or it doesn’t.
It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve really started to embrace that challenge and create in black and white—not just convert images to it. I’ve started to seek out the compositions that thrive without color. The moments that glow in the shadows. The tension that lives in grain. And what’s emerged from that process are some of the most powerful and personal images I’ve ever made.
Low light black and white has helped shape my voice not because it’s bold and obvious, but because it isn’t. It’s the quiet work that makes people lean in closer. It makes you look. And it reminds me that silence, when used well, isn’t emptiness—it’s presence.
Some of my strongest images—the ones I come back to, the ones that have placed in competitions, the ones I feel say the most—started with very little light. But they spoke, and black and white gave them the room to be heard.
That’s the kind of work I want to keep making. Quiet, honest, unflinching. The kind that doesn’t need to scream to be remembered.