Why Several Street Photographers Shoot Black & White?

Federico Alegría
5 min readMar 1, 2021

Skipping panchromatic film, which truly delivers black and white photographs, every digital black and white image out there has been post-produced via software. Therefore, every black and white photograph made through a digital format, is nothing more than a post-production that has been made after pulling the raw files an SD card.

Unless you own one of these bad boys, you aren’t really shooting black and white digital photography. Even Fujifilm’s film simulations aren’t pure monochrome renditions of reality since their sensors are not monochrome engineered. Covered that, we can say that black and white photography nowadays is a matter of post-production rather than an inside-camera thing.

Many genres enjoy the benefits of the monochromatic aesthetic, but there is one that truly excels at it, and that is street photography. For some reason, people think that street photography should be done in black and white, and this is obviously not true. What is true is that many solid street photographers tend to develop their images based in a black and white decision.

Today we’ll be talking a bit more about the main reasons why this decision happens to be so popular among street photographers.

Black and White is Quite Timeless

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