Richard Koci Hernandez is one of the most popular photographers on Instagram and an award-winning multimedia journalist. At The Power of Storytelling 2015, he spoke about creating meaningful and unforgettable visual stories and and shared his best techniques in street photography.
Here is the video recording of his speech, and some highlights:
“I believe in all of us there’s a visual storyteller waiting to emerge. And I’m the guy with the phone and my mission here, if there’s anything I can do today as a photographer who spent his life as a photographer, who works only in mobile now, if there’s any message I could take globally – turn the camera from ourselves, please, out into the world instead, and I think we would make a better world.”
“What matters is the eye. The eye is what survives. The eye will survive no matter what technological innovation may develop. But it is a way to deliver our message in a way that’s increasingly global, more available than ever. The thing that matters and survives, though, is the eye. It’s our passion to tell stories. And how we develop that eye, the practice that we could do here today, and tomorrow, and the next day, as we stop focusing on our lattes and start thinking about stories, is realizing that the elements of good storytelling are eternal.”
“Don’t think, just shoot. Stop thinking right now. The best thing you can do at the beginning, and this is stolen straight from Ira Glass, is “do a lot of work”. And if you want to be a visual storyteller, there’s no question. You don’t have to buy film anymore, you can shoot a million photographs between here and the bathroom.”