This is not that post

I discovered black-and-white photography in elementary school. I was seven years old. That is all the origin story this first post needs.

This is not a post about why I love black-and-white photography. That will come later. This is a post about why Monochrome exists.

How Digital Changed Photography

I love taking photos. I love walking the streets with a camera. That part of photography has barely changed for me since the days of film. What has changed is everything that happens after the shutter is pressed.

Post-production moved from the darkroom to the computer. That shift is obvious, and largely accepted.

There is nothing that will ever replace the experience of being in a darkroom: the red light, the timers, the enlarger, the smell of chemicals, the sense that something irreversible is happening in your hands.

That ritual mattered.

But the deeper change is not where development happens—it’s what the photograph becomes at the end of the process.

Today, photographs overwhelmingly exist as digital artifacts. They are stored, shared, and consumed on screens. They scroll by. They accumulate. They disappear into feeds, folders, and clouds. What used to end as an object now often ends as a file.

At the same time, today’s technology offers something the darkroom never did: a far more accessible path to extremely high-quality prints. What once required dedicated space, specialized equipment, and significant ongoing cost is now achievable with much lower friction. The ritual is different, but the result—the ability to make photographs that deserve to exist physically—is no longer reserved for a few.

Monochrome Is a Project About Materiality

What was lost in the transition to digital photography is not quality. It is materiality.

Monochrome exists to bring photography back into the physical world. To turn photographs into objects again. Prints. Frames. Things that can be held, hung, moved, gifted, archived, or forgotten in a drawer.

A printed photograph is never truly identical to another. Even if the image is the same, the object is not. The print on my wall is not the one on yours. The frame ages differently. The light is different. The context is different. The photograph becomes specific again.

I Build Software. I Miss Building Things.

There is also a more personal layer to this project.

My professional life is entirely about software. I help build digital tools for a living. I enjoy it, but it leaves very little room for making things with my hands. I have gravitated toward manual hobbies for years, but most of them require starting from zero—new skills, new tools, non-negligible investments of time and money. As a result, they often stall before they really begin.

Photography is different. It lets me bridge what I already do well in the digital world—shooting, editing, working with software—with something manual and tangible: printing, framing, and turning images into objects.

One Project, Three Worlds

Finally, Monochrome is also a practical decision.

This project uses the same tools I help build every day—publishing, domains, identity, commerce—but in a real context. Not a test site. Not a demo. A living system with real constraints and real outcomes. That makes the time spent on it easier to justify, and more valuable in return.

Monochrome sits at the intersection of my work, my leisure, and my hobbies. That overlap is intentional.

This is the reason the project exists.

Mandatory Actionable Ending

What should you do next?

Honestly? Nothing. Just wait for the next post.

But if you’re the kind of person who prefers something actionable, here are three options, roughly on a scale from “I don’t care” to “I love this” to “Everyone should read Monochrome”:

• If you have no interest in a conversation about black-and-white photography, feel free to unsubscribe. The last thing I want is to clutter anyone’s inbox.
• If you like black-and-white photography, make sure you’re subscribed—and head over to monochrome.photo to do the same.
• If you think everyone should hear about Monochrome, forward this post to a friend or two.

That’s it.