Life Happens in COLOR

A Street Photography Manifesto by Nancy Lehrer  

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I believe in the use of photography to tell candid stories that document the human condition in order to bring people together with understanding and acceptance.

These are the principles that guide my photography:

  • Create compelling stories: Say something, ask questions.
  • Life happens in COLOR: Color carries emotional content.
  • Create visual poems: Composition matters.
  • Composition is additive: Use a lot of adjectives.
  • Connect the dots: Capture the scene as the subject.
  • Create short stories: Tell a story through time.
  • Travel: Spread a worldview of understanding and acceptance.
  • Take chances: An image is more than the sum of its pixels.
  • Follow the National Press Photographer Association’s Code of Ethics.
    nppa.org/code_of_ehtics

In the chapters of this manifesto, I explain my approach to street photography as an informal genre of documentary photography and visual story telling. I explain how I go about recognizing and then communicating the stories that I observe.  Within the descriptions of my images, I detail my process for identifying photographic opportunities, my thoughts while taking an image, and how I evaluate an image’s narrative strength during editing.

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