Roger Bruhn has been making photographs for over 50 years, and during that time he has worked in a number of different styles and with many different subject matters. He began as a street photographer in the 1960s and that has been a consistent thread throughout his career, the one expression to which he always returns.

“For me, a good street photograph will exhibit these qualities. First, it should represent a slice of time in which all of the visual elements come together to form a cohesive whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, that moment when every compositional element of the image fuses into a lucid and intelligible form that somehow transcends the moment itself and becomes—a street photograph.

A good street photograph should also be a little ambiguous; it should leave some room for imagination on the part of the viewer. The photograph needs to pose a question, What’s going on here? It has to be a little…sideways. It has to glance off of things in a way that encourages speculation. It can be a look in someone’s eye or the twist of the mouth if you’re shooting people. It can be that little something that is just slightly off-kilter, something that makes you stop and take notice.

Finally, like any good work of art, a street photograph must ultimately be constructed out of nothing. You confront the flux and flow of reality as it exists in the street and you order that chaos with your mind and your heart and your lens—with that and a little luck, you create street photograph." —Roger Bruhn

Roger Bruhn did his undergraduate and graduate work in English and Philosophy at the University of Nebraska and has been a practicing artist for over 50 years. In 1991 the University of Nebraska Press published his award-winning monograph Dreams in Dry Places, 118 Images of Historic Nebraska Architecture. He was one of the featured artists in Picture Nebraska, a documentary about Nebraska photographers produced by Nebraska Educational Television and was the winner of the 2008 Mayor’s Art Award for Lifetime Achievement. Mr. Bruhn co-curated “Evolving Eden,” a large photography exhibit of nationally known artists that opened in February of 2009 at the Sheldon Museum of Art. His work is in the collections of the Sheldon Museum of Art, Joslyn Art Museum, the Museum of Nebraska Art, the New Britain (CT) Museum of American Art and numerous private and corporate collections. He lives in Lincoln, NE with his wife, Pat and two cats.