Richard Bram

INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS:

2013 BRAM/NATION, Galerie Hertz, Louisville, Kentucky.
2011 Richard Bram: In Color! Lunasa, New York City;
“3xKlingeln,” Mainz, Germany.
2009 Last Man Shooting, Galerie Hertz, Louisville, Kentucky.
Musicians At Work, Wilton's Music Hall, London; 2008 Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow, Scotland.
2007 Transfigurations, Soundwaves Music Festival, Brighton, England.
Panoramic Street Photographs, Galerie Kasten, Mannheim, Germany; Galerie Hertz, Louisville.
Richard Bram: Street Photographer, KunstRaum Bernusstraße, Frankfurt, Germany.
2005 Girls In Tears, Galerie Hertz, Louisville.
Musicians at Work, Casa de la Ciudad, Oaxaca, Mexico,
Tate St. Ives, Cornwall, England
2004 Royal Academy of Music, London.
Public Shootings, Galerie Kasten, Mannheim,
Lithuanian Photo-Artists Union, Vilnius, Lithuania,
2003 Galerie Hertz, Louisville.
3X Klingeln... IV, Neustadt, Mainz, Germany.
Transfigurations, Galerie Kasten, Mannheim.
2001 Transfigurations, A Collaboration, Galerie Hertz, Louisville.
Found Objects, #54, The Gallery, London.
2000 Fotografias, Centro Fotografico Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Oaxaca, Mexico.
1999 Photographs 1979-1999, Vine Gallery, Louisville.
1997 A Figure, Zephyr Gallery, Louisville; Neustadt, Mainz.
1994 Big Hair & True Love, Zephyr Gallery, Louisville.
1993 In Russia, Kentucky Art and Craft Foundation, Louisville.
1991 Spectators, Zephyr Gallery, Louisville.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS:

2013 Common Ground: Contemporary American Street Photography,
New Orleans Photo Alliance; drkrm Gallery, Los Angeles CA.
Streetshots/NYC The Museum of the City of New York
iN-PUBLiC! Street Photography, Thailand Creative & Design Center, Bangkok.
2012 In-Public, International Photography Festival, Tel Aviv, Israel.
RETROSPECT: 50 Years of Photo Archives, Cressman Arts Center, Louisville
American Contemporary Photography, Tbilisi History Museum, Rep. of Georgia.
Occupy! International Center of Photography, Governor’s Island Galleries, New York.
Black & White, The Center for Fine Art Photography, Ft. Collins, Colorado.
2011 London Street Photography: 1860-2010, Museum of London; 2012, Museum of the City of New York.
In-Public, Derby Museum & Art Gallery, Derby, UK.
From Distant Streets, Galerie Hertz, Louisville, Kentucky.
DINNER, Umbrella Arts, New York.
2010 In-Public@10, Photofusion, London
Flight, PhotoPlace Gallery, Middlebury, Vermont
Latino Culture and Latin America, University of Louisville Photographic Archives,
Louisville, Ky.
2009 My World is a Family, Central Exhibition Hall, Perm, Russia
The Christmas Photo Album, OST Gallery, Moscow
2008 Fetes de Fin d'Annees, Charlet Photographies, Paris
2006 Crossroads: Contemporary Street Photography, Oklahoma City Museum of Art.
Postcards from Italy, Museo del Tulle, Panicale, Italy.
2005 Focus on the Street, Hite Art Institute, Louisville, Kentucky.
2004 Phototographers' Network, Studio Thomas Kellner, Siegen, Germany.
2002 In-Public.com: Street Photography, Acute Angle Gallery, London.
2001 All Our Children, University of Louisville Photographic Archives.
2000 Gutenberg 2000 - Kunst in der Stadt, Mainz.
From Across the Pond, Ardgillan Castle, Dublin, Ireland.
1996 Plastic Fantastic! Benham Gallery, Seattle, Washington.
1995 Off the Highway, Robin Rule Contemporary, Denver, Colorado.
1994 100 Years of Street Photography, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio.
Paperworks, Louisville Visual Art Association; Frankfurter Hof, Mainz.
1993 Photography: Current Forms, Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, Indiana.

SELECTED INSTITUTIONAL COLLECTIONS:

Museum of the City of New York
Museum of London
Bibliotheque national de France, Paris
George Eastman House International Museum of Photography,
Rochester, New York
National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC
Prague House of Photography, Czech Republic
Palace of Justice, Kaiserslautern, Rhineland-Pfalz, Germany
University of Louisville Photographic Archives
AIG Global Investment Group (Europe), London
Barclays Bank, London
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., London

PUBLICATIONS:

2010 10 - ten years of in-public, foreword by Jonathan Glancey; Nick Turpin Publishing, London
"Big Hair & True Love," 779.com, London, http://www.sevensevennine.com/?p=1455
"Richard Bram, streetfotografii" StreetPhoto.sk, Bratislava, Slovakia, http://www.streetphoto.sk
2009 "Wall Street, 2008," Publication #1, Inspiration Nick Turpin Publishing, London
2007 "Transfigurations," Lens Culture, Paris, www.lensculture.com/bram.html#
"Richard Bram: Sokak Fotograflari," Fotoritim, Istanbul, http://www.fotoritim.com/yazi/richard-bram--sokak-fotograflari
2006 Richard Bram: Street Photography, Benedict Press, Germany
"Transfigurations," Fotophile #51, New York
"The Way He Sees," Times Journal of Photography, April 2006, Mumbai, India
2005 "An American in London," Amateur Photographer, 8 Oct. 2005, London
2003 Occasional Sights, Anna Best & The Photographers' Gallery, London
2002 "Transfigurations," La Fotografia Actual #91, June/July 2002, Barcelona
2000 Fotoseptiembre International 2000, Centro de la Imagen, Mexico, D.F.
1994 The New Street Photography, CD-ROM, 1994 Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio

GALLERY REPRESENTATION:

Galerie Kasten, Mannheim, Germany
KunstRaum Bernusstrasse, Frankfurt, Germany
Charlet Photographies, Paris, France
Galerie Hertz, Louisville, Kentucky
Galeria La Mano Magica, Oaxaca, Mexico

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES:

2012 Leader, Street Photography workshops in Tbilisi, Tel Aviv, Bangkok
2010-11 Visiting Lecturer, Street Photography, New York University.
2007 Workshop Tutor, Street Photography, Tate Modern, London; Tate Liverpool
2005-6 Visiting Lecturer, Performance and Photography, Royal Academy of Music, London
2001 Invited to join iN-PUBLiC.com Street Photography collective
1997 Lecturer in Photojournalism, Richmond College, London
1984-now Independent Photographer
1976-84 Business career with several firms in U. S. A.
1975, 2001 Master of International Management, Thunderbird School of Global Management, Glendale, Arizona
1974 Bachelor of Science, Political Science, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
1952 Born, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U. S. A.

I am an urban man. My adult life has been spent by choice in the centers of cities rather than the suburbs. Being in a city means that I walk, or ride public transport, rather than drive. This enables me to see what is happening around me. These images are my personal visual diary: they are not staged or created artificially. Reality is quite strange enough.

I am a Street Photographer. This is to be, as Max Kozloff put it, a 'professional stranger.' Most of my photographs originate there, in the random chaos of the street, in the ambient weirdness of everyday life. Street Photography may be the single most difficult photographic genre. It is a fierce challenge: to condense from the chaos of reality something visually valid and psychologically revealing about both the subject, the viewer and perhaps the photographer into a rectangle in a fraction of a second. The editing process can be downright heartbreaking: so many frames, so few photographs.

The images here represent strands that have always run through my street work: angst, romance, humor. Some were shot in London, some in New York, some elsewhere, but the same themes recur in all places. Cities are stressful: the pressures of work, social interaction, constant noise, dirt and lack of private space all add to the tension. Yet people manage to live, love, take pleasure in life in the midst of it all, and that's what I'm trying to reflect.

When shooting, I don't know precisely what I'm looking for until it happens in front of me. This is the great difficulty of working the street. Most of the photos happen as I'm walking from one place to another: Generally I'm only briefly in any one spot. Once in a great while there is time to work a situation, to get more than one or two frames of a scene, but rarely.

If some of my images make others laugh, that is a wonderful thing; the world needs more laughter. However, I think my work has shifted over the years. It is moving away from the 'one-liner' visual joke towards images that also operate on a deeper level and are more ambiguous and layered in meaning.

Through most of my career, my personal work was shot on black and white film. I'd always been more drawn to it.I like the level of abstraction it brings: the distilled monochromatic essence of a frame without the distraction of color. 'In black and white you look at the faces; in color you look at the clothes.'

However, in 2010 I began consciously to shoot the streets in color. I had no problem with color per se, having always made color images for commercial work. The digital revolution has returned me to color street photography, as now I can fully control the color and make prints myself, something I was never able to do with color chemistry. Color is much harder to do well because there is so much more that can go wrong. It's like drawing vs. painting: getting the lines and shades right is hard, but when you start putting pigments into it as well it gets really hard. I welcome the challenge, though: it's keeping me awake and re-invigorating my photography.