Meet Lance Bradford | Photographer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Lance Bradford and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Lance, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
I didn’t have much of a choice, probably. I wouldn’t be very good at anything else and would not really enjoy anything else.
It’s something I would do regardless of any conventional success because I feel compelled to do it.
It’s definitely not boring.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I take a lot of satisfaction from looking at things from unusual perspectives and capturing it with a camera and sharing it. I shoot in areas that are just not represented, normally, when you see photographs of Houston. It is not always easy to stick to an artistic principle but compromise is failure, in my mind. I have evolved and learned a lot about the “craft” element of photography over the years but those are mainly technical issues dealing with camera technology which moves pretty fast. My personal vision or how I see the world has not changed at all. My attitude is you can only do what you’re good at and what you enjoy and if you keep doing it, hopefully, success will come and your body of work will be the better for it.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Houston is probably the best restaurant town in the US so the itinerary would involve a lot of eating. I cant think of anywhere that has such a wide variety of food to offer. There’s the AL Quick Stop in Montrose (Mediterranean), Lankford Grocery (Burgers) and Burns BBQ in Acres Homes. Chinatown and Little Saigon on the far west side are obvious destinations. I wish Brady’s Landing, which was an East Side staple for decades, was still open. It was a cool place on a little island in the ship channel. You could eat and watch giant ships sail by the window. The Menil Collection and the Rothko Chapel would be on the list as well as the James Turrell Twilight Epiphany Skyspace on the Rice campus. Rice also has a nice little cash only bar called Valhalla under the Keck Lecture Hall. It’s run by student and faculty volunteers. No liquor, just beer and wine. I could recommend a few spots that aren’t on the map (and do not encourage visitors) that are very interesting but I don’t want to give up all of my secrets.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My parents deserve a lot of credit for encouraging my artistic impulses when I was young. Particularly my mom, she paid for books, painting lessons, musical instruments, the whole deal. And that sort of encouragement was definitely not the norm growing up in a small town in West Texas so, yeah, she was a big early supporter. And my dad was a combat photographer in Vietnam so I got a lot of early interest looking at his photos from the war.

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