Richard Bram says this about himself and his work:

"I call myself a Street Photographer, though once upon a time one would have simply said 'I am a photographer' and that is what it would have meant. Most of my photographs originate in the random chaos of the public space of the street, in the ambient weirdness of everyday life. I expose frames nearly every day and always carry a camera. These images are my personal visual diary. They are not staged; reality is plenty strange enough."

Born in Philadelphia in 1952, Richard Bram grew up in Ohio, Utah and Arizona. A series of lack-lustre jobs led him to Louisville, Kentucky, where in 1984, he lost his head and became a professional photographer, building his early career in public relations, public events, performance and portrait work. Moving to London in 1997, Bram concentrated on street photography and other personal photographic projects. In 2001 he joined the first international Street Photographers’ collective, iN-PUBLiC.com. Returning to the States in 2008, he now lives in New York City. In 2011 Bram curated “From Distant Streets,” exhibiting 29 international street photographers at Galerie Hertz in Louisville. He regularly writes and lectures on the subject and has given street photography workshops in such diverse locations as the Tate Modern and Tate Liverpool in the UK, Bangkok, Thailand, Tel Aviv, Israel, as well as the KOLGA Tbilisi Photo Festival in the Republic of Georgia. His work is in institutional, corporate, and personal collections, including the Museum of London, the Museum of the City of New York, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the George Eastman House/International Museum of Photography and the University of Louisville Photographic Archives.
 

The main body of my photography originates in the Street, in everyday life. These images are not staged, but vision snatched from reality. This reality is filled with odd juxtapositions, ambient weirdness, and unexpected humour that exist for a moment and disappear. I often see the possibility of a picture emerging from a given setting, but the vagaries of chance play a large part in the final image. Chance favours the prepared mind: When the subject, the setting, and the photographer's eye come together for a brief instant, for a 60th of a second or less, something out of reality, something of surreality occurs. A photograph is made.

"... to see things as they are, not as they should or could be." August Sander, 1927

"Either Richard Bram is very lucky or he has an unerring photographic instinct for extraordinary situations and motifs. In any case, his pictures are honest messages from our everyday world. They are humorous, whimsical sometimes sarcastic and ironic and yet always full of sympathy for the protagonists of his scenes. Richard Bram's studio is the street. In the hustle and bustle of the big city, he stops time with his photographs. His scenic images are an unusual narrative photography, which shows us anecdotally cheerful to insightful critical about the state of our society. His photography is honest and immediate and therefore of such great credibility for the viewer."

Galerie Kasten, Mannheim May 2004

"Richard Bram's passion and specialty is "street photography," that elusive photographic genre that lies somewhere between pictorial photography, reportage and snapshot, with references to portraiture, (urban) landscape and trend. Bram finds - not without humor - his scenes in London, Mexico, Mainz and everywhere where people are on the move. With the spontaneity and readiness to react of the image hunter, coupled with a feeling for a sensitive approach to his fellow human beings and guided by high demands on composition and content of photography, he finds and collects motifs that unerringly depict our urban everyday life, but also illuminate and analyze it in all its details."

Günter Minas, 2004