Seeing in Shades: Why Colorblindness Made Me Fall in Love with Black & White Photography

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with color. As someone who’s colorblind, the world often comes to me in mixed si

gnals—reds and greens blending into each other, subtle hues escaping me, traffic lights occasionally turning into puzzles. While some might see this as a limitation, I’ve come to realize it gave me a different way of looking.

Black & white photography has always felt like home. It strips away the noise of color and lets me focus on what truly matters to me: texture, contrast, light, shadow, form—the things that don’t rely on hues to speak but on presence. The crack in a wall, the fold of fabric, the way a shadow slices across a floor—these are my colors.

Being colorblind has never been about absence, but about attention. When others are dazzled by a sunset’s palette, I find myself mesmerized by the silhouettes of trees against the sky. Where others might talk about the “warm tones” of a portrait, I’m watching the way light curves around a cheekbone or falls into the eye.

Black & white doesn’t feel like a reduction to me. It feels like amplification. It amplifies emotion, it amplifies atmosphere, it amplifies the details we might otherwise miss. In monochrome, I can show the world the way I sense it—stripped, direct, raw.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always thought of photography as closer to music than to painting. Black & white is like a melody played on a single instrument: limited in palette, infinite in expression.

So yes, I’m colorblind. But that’s not what defines me. What defines me is what I choose to see—and what I want to share. And for me, that will always live in the shades between black and white.