Lana Santoro’s interest in photography began with a high school photography class and her first paying job at a camera store. She’s sure she acquired the job because she visited the store with such great interest and frequency. Many years later, she’s still taking pictures. Now joined by her husband, Christopher Santoro, Lana and Chris enjoy traveling and capturing visual stories from their adventures. Often composing shots from the daily action on the street, they create images that capture contemplative, humorous, and lighthearted moments. Thematic in their work is the use of environmental print, text, or signs to frame messaging, sometimes amusing, ironic, or profound.
Street Signs Photography centers on capturing the spontaneity of events on the street. While the camera holds moments in stillness, it’s the action, or verbs within even the briefest of moment, that string an event together. Verbs breathe life into pauses and are representative of the universal law that everything moves. Life is ever changing movement. Street life is ever changing movement, and the camera’s shutter holds that moment of movement still enough for us to observe, appreciate, question, smile at, or even bring our own impressions to the telling of that visual story. With Street Signs, we enjoy finding moments and capturing those verbs. Our collection highlights: connect, contemplate, look, mark, react, rest, talk, walk, and work. For us, photography is the joy of staying in the present moment and capturing suspended action. As Marc Ribound has said, “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely every hundredth of a second.”