The Power of Monochrome: The Journeys of Our Contest Winners
- Abdul Qudoos
- May 8
- 4 min read
Black and white photography has the unique ability to transform ordinary scenes into timeless works of art. By removing color, photographers rely on light, shadow, texture, and emotion to create images that feel both powerful and deeply personal. Behind every winning photograph lies a story—not only of the moment captured, but also of the artist who saw meaning within it.
In this article, we present the stories of the winners of our Black and White Photography Contest, photographers whose creativity and vision stood out among submissions from around the world. Through their experiences, inspirations, and artistic journeys, we explore how they used the simplicity of monochrome to create images filled with atmosphere, emotion, and visual impact.
SVETLIN YOSIFOV
My name is Svetlin Yosifov and I'm a travel photographer from Bulgaria. First of all, I want to thank the jury for choosing my photo "Cow Silhouettes" in the black and white photography competition organized by The Artist Gallery Awards.
"Critics" and friends characterize my photography as artistic documentary travel photography. My passion for photography began in 2008 and my first photo was with a Kodak underwater film camera. From that moment on, I was already infected by the adrenaline of showing through my photographs my vision of reality in its different dimensions.
Over the years, I have gone through most genres in photography from landscape photos to street photos. But for me, portrait travel documentary photography will remain in my heart forever. I love visiting tribal communities that are difficult for ordinary tourists to access, living among them for a while to learn more about their customs. I am interested in still wild places such as: South Sudan, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, Papua, Ethiopia, India, etc. In the near future, I have more trips ahead of me, as well as publishing my first photo books, which will be luxury limited editions for Ethiopia, South Sudan (Mundari), Cuba, etc.
Over the years, my photos have won dozens of photo competitions and participated in international exhibitions around the world.
My photos can be seen on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/svetlin_yosifov
Portfolio: https://gallery.1x.com/picsvet
PREETI & PRASHANT CHACKO
We are Preeti and Prashant Chacko, a husband-and-wife duo based in Dubai who work together as @composingthewild. We think of ourselves as storytellers in the wild rather than wildlife photographers in the conventional sense. We would like our images to feel less like records of a sighting and more like moments worth lingering over, which is a different ambition from the species count or the iconic shot.
The fun fact most people find surprising is that we shoot side by side and almost always come away with completely different photographs. Preeti is drawn to gentleness and grace, often capturing intimate moments of beauty such as the bond between a mother and her young, and her approach is marked by patience and a quiet sense of awe. Prashant, by contrast, embraces the dramatic. He seeks out wild landscapes and moments where the light and terrain are almost theatrical. Together, our work is not a contest of perspectives but a conversation. Photography found us late and indirectly.
Born and raised in India, where wildlife was largely something we encountered in zoos and textbooks, we relocated to Durban, South Africa for work in 2010, and our first safari that November changed what we wanted to do with our time. Prashant nearly arrived at his first proper trip to Zambia armed with little more than a Blackberry, until a last-minute admonition from our photography mentor rescued the experience. We are largely self-taught, and what most accelerated our craft was travelling alongside brilliant and generous mentors, by watching, listening and then by doing.
Our favourite work, and almost without exception all of it, is in black and white. We believe that colour, especially dramatic colour, has a half-life when you live with it. The eye habituates, the way a perfume disappears to its wearer. Form, gesture and emotion don’t habituate the same way. They keep asking to be read. We would like our images to hang large on walls and reward people on the thousandth glance as well as the first, and that, more than any aesthetic preference, is why we work in monochrome.
The oldest art anyone has ever found, scratched on cave walls forty thousand years ago, is of
animals, and we think of our work as a small continuation of that conversation. As children, we first learn about love, courage and kindness through animals in stories, and somewhere on the way to adulthood that connection quietly fades. What we are thinking when we shoot is almost always the same question: what does this animal feel like, and how do we make a stranger feel it too? Our aspiration is to keep deepening that work, and to leave the wild a little better seen than we found it. We also try to give back to conservation at every opportunity.
You can find more of our work at www.composingthewild.art and on Instagram at
Don't forget to take a look to our other open photo contests for more opportunities to showcase your skills and creativity. Explore them here: www.theartistgallery.art/open-contests
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