Life Happens in Color
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.
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.
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
This manifesto is not a how book, instead it is a book of what and why. It is deeply personal. It outlines my beliefs on photography which have emerged from a restless pursuit for an answer to the haunting question: “Why photograph?”. I unapologetically espouse my prejudices about photography and its purpose, and I use quotes from some of my photography heroes in order to validate my opinions.
Finally, this manifesto is driven by my desire to share a method for producing fine photographs in a documentary style. Unfortunately, as interest in street photography has grown, the genre has become flooded with stream of high-contrast monochrome images of banal non-stories and adolescent visual jokes. I believe in photographing in color, and I believe in capturing complex visual scenes. In this manifesto I hope to show that street photography is more than just awkward moments in black and white.