Word on the Street

Walking the streets with a camera in hand can yield insightful and surprising interpretations of daily life. For thirty years, photographer Richard Nagler has sought out these insights by pairing isolated words found in his environment with random passersby. The results are playful yet profound. “Visual poetics” is how Allen Ginsberg once characterized Nagler’s photographs. “Every one of these picture poems brings to my mind a haiku.” Drawing on some of the same elements that distinguish the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, and Ed Ruscha, Nagler’s urban photographs have delighted audiences around the world. Compelling, shocking, amusing, and sensitive, each portrait is a visual pun-a wink to the reader and an invitation to create a story to complete the narrative. Some photographs took weeks to realize, capture, and record. Some took milliseconds. Sometimes years go by before Nagler spots a word suitable to become a picture—after all, these are in many ways accidental photographs. The magic of his work rests in the serendipitous moment when person and word come together. Word on the Street reveals that we are all part of an amazing artistic mosaic, even as we blithely stroll down the street.