The streets of hollywood. This is not your typical street photography workshop.

a full-day immersive experience where we confront the myth, decay, and masquerade of Los Angeles’ most photographed and least understood street.

This is Hollywood / Poetics of the Blvd

From Vine to Highland, from the Walk of Fame to the alley behind Musso & Frank’s—Hollywood Boulevard isn’t just a location, it’s a hallucination. A collapsing dream. A stage. A hunting ground for archetypes and masks.

This workshop is about more than framing a decisive moment.

It’s about seeing what’s trying not to be seen—and learning how to photograph that rupture.

A STATEMENT OF VISION

They keep calling it street photography-but the street is gone. Look to our immediate past: This is POST-STREET

The so-called “street” is gone. What Weegee once prowled at night, what Diane Arbus revealed in daylight, what Garry Winogrand and Helen Levitt caught in the flux of the avenue, what Bruce Gilden ambushed with flash—those stages of human theater have dissolved. The boulevard, the stoop, the corner, the open square: privatized, surveilled, transformed into zones of commerce and control. To call it street photography now is nostalgic, a ghost of the democratic public once captured in the frame. The open encounter with the stranger—once the heart of documentary practice—has migrated into transit hubs under CCTV, into mall atriums, into rideshares, into digital feeds where faces circulate as avatars. The street, as it was, has vanished.

POST-STREET is the refusal of nostalgia and the acknowledgment of new terrain. Where Robert Capa threw himself into war zones and Gordon Parks turned his lens on the violence of American inequality, the contemporary photographer faces an arena where agency is coded by algorithms and visibility is scripted by corporate and state surveillance. The task is no longer to simply walk and witness, but to navigate architectures of control and spectacle. POST-STREET insists that the photographer must locate the public in protest lines, in infrastructures, in shifting systems where power hides and reveals itself—and to re-stage visibility against its erasure.

What You’ll Learn:

• If we are out there, I'm guiding you, we have assignments. You will learn something (ask anyone that has taken a class from me).

  • How to read atmosphere like light

  • Building myth through frame & motion

  • Approaching strangers as if in dream

  • Shooting ethically, and ecstatically

  • On-street feedback + mini editing session (Lightroom/C1)

  • Setting your camera to get it out of the way

  • You don't have to have a Leica

Includes:

• One-on-one feedback with Bil and a group critique

• A PDF HANDBOOK

• Post-workshop group review (virtual or in person)

• Access to the private online community for ongoing critique & support (forthcoming)

YOUR VISION

To say we all have a vision is true —but few of us are taught how to see it, let alone notice it. That's what this workshop is for.

Whether you're carrying a Leica or a cracked iPhone, this is about unlocking the poetic, the mythic, the haunted fragments of the world around you. Not just street photography. Not just documentation. This is magic.

• 3-5 mythic images with narrative gravitas

• "Poetic Image Checklist"

• Access to post-workshop share + critique

• Peer group invite for future image rituals

Who It’s For?

Photographers, poets with cameras, image-makers hungry for depth.

No matter your experience, this workshop will challenge how you move, how you see, and how you become the street.

YOUR INSTRUCTOR

“TEACHING MUST BE AN EXPERIENCE TAUGHT BY THOSE WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY.” – BIL BROWN

Whether working in portraiture, fashion, experimental work or diaristic photo essays, Bil Brown’s visionary imagery captures highly energetic moments and extremities of the conscious world, or the foreboding of prescience — of what is to come. Often using his work as a platform for advanced ideas, social-change, and excising historical reference addressing current events, Brown pushes the boundaries of his visual storytelling as a “concrete-poetry” infused with empathy for our current cultural milieu. Bil’s work excels in long-form essays, exhibitions, books and prints exploring a single subject or theme. Maintaining a recognizable voice across all media. Oft an editorial contributor to magazines and periodicals such as FLAUNT, PURPLE FASHION MAGAZINE, AUTRE, INTERVIEW, SCHON DETAILS, PAPER, The Sunday Times (UK), Le Monde (FR), Mala Fronta DNES (CZ), and founding editor and publisher of Black & Grey magazine. Bil also is the founder and president of the creative agency NINESIXTYNINE, and is often a presenter for LEICA AKADAMIE worldwide.

Bil’s still photography has been exhibited in numerous group and solo shows. His 2018 show at the Leica Gallery LA, in conjunction with the estate of the late Jim Marshall, PROTEST, vehemently documented the 2016-2017 protests following the election of an American President. In 2020, during the global pandemic, Bil started a teaching series with Leica Akademie entitled Fragments Toward the History of Photography. In 2021, Bil’s series MYLAR was made into NFTs and held gallery shows at two galleries in Vienna, Austria and now for the first time is at Tamarkin Camera in Chicago July-September, 2025!