For over a decade in the 1980s and 1990s Richard Bram photographed people at the Kentucky Derby Festival in Louisville, an annual two-week event preceding the first Saturday in May, the day of the Kentucky Derby horse race. It was all about the gigantic hair. You can see his pictures in Big Hair & True Love, that also includes images from the Kentucky State Fair and the Strassenfest German heritage festival.
“We need more laughter. Street photography is one genre where one is allowed to show the humor of life … [it] exists to remind us of the small joys of life, that the world can be beautiful, funny, joyful, and yes, sad, often all at the same time”
– Richard Bram via Slate
“The thing about street photography is that you are always looking, but you rarely know what you are looking for until it’s in front of you,” he said. “It’s the challenge and delight of seeing something strange appear in real life in real time and throwing a rectangle around it. You don’t have to set things up; reality is plenty weird enough”
– Richard Bram
Richard Bram (born 1952 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is based in London. His work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Museum of London, Museum of the City of New York, and Derby Museum and Art Gallery as part of Format International Photography Festival. It is held in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, and the Museum of London.
He took up working as a full-time photographer relatively late in life (via):
The beginning of 1984 was the end of the ‘regular job’ phase of my life. I’d always taken pictures as an avid hobby snap shooter and my interest grew through the different phases of my business career. I enjoyed it more and more and began to get some positive feedback on my pictures – ‘great photo – you should do this seriously’ sorts of comments. One evening at a party, I told a friend who’d run a fine art photography school in Louisville that I was thinking of becoming a photographer. His advice: “Don’t do it! You shouldn’t be a photographer unless there is nothing else you can do.” He was right. I am simply unable to do anything else, and I’ve never looked back.
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