The Awards Collective was created to feature the works of artists who have received either a Juror’s Award or Director’s Award in ASG’s Online exhibitions. Lawrence Manning’s image Breakdown received the Directors’ Award in the trees exhibition juried by Geoffrey Koslov. Lawrence’s exhibition Murder in Nampa is discussed in this GalleryTalk.
Artist Statement
“Murder in Nampa depicts crows and ravens in dramatic, existential moments intended to portray human themes. At its core, the work is all about me. Through symbol, metaphor, legend, and myth, these images address my history, my upbringing, and the person I still struggle to accept. My friends, family, community, and the wider world supply the characters, the plots, and the dreams and nightmares that populate them.
Art lets me step out of the confessional of internal scrutiny. My thoughts, my conscience, my journey are deliberately not put into words — instead, I layer and juxtapose the birds digitally, building natural and existential compositions. These images are not Audubon renderings of reality; they are spiritual messengers. As such, they let me communicate not only with the living, but with the dead. They let me keep one foot in and one foot out
of what it means to feel alive.
I intend this work as a mirror — a psychological, spiritual, and intellectual reflection of my soul, my heart, my mind.
All my life I have run from my childhood memories and from an adult’s feelings of inadequacy. My childhood scarred me for life. Scars remind us that the body can heal, but what of the soul? I carry internal scars: scars that leave clues to the wounds hidden beneath them.
I am, by trade, a commercial photographer — the kind whose work ends up on billboards and in international publications. Those were the days I hid behind the camera and captured the outer world. But as an artist revealing my inner world, I find myself confused and intimidated. I am not a coward, but I feel helpless and worthless. Ask me who I am, and I can tell you. Ask me how I feel, and I might take the fifth.
This project is about leaving behind the guarded, protective existence of a photographer to venture into a new paradigm — one of inner creativity that reveals my true essence. Nothing was more powerful, more rewarding, than taking pictures and hiding behind a camera. And nothing terrifies me more than my attempt to forgo the perfect, literal camera record, and instead open a visible portal onto the themes of my soul and heart.
I have discovered that my past, my present, and my hoped-for future all become visible in this art. And my dreams cannot forget the nightmares that have trespassed on my good intentions.
In the image “Vantage Point,” the viewer might read it as a clever self-portrait playing with the boundaries of reality — holding a picture of the action unfolding at the top of the pole. Can I escape being the clever photographer attempting to control reality?”
Lawrence Manning
August, 2026
Bio
Lawrence Manning went to college to study music and become a jazz musician. He discovered he lacked the talent for it, so he did the practical thing instead and trained to teach English. Upon graduation, he joined the Peace Corps and served in Liberia and Ethiopia.
It was there, with barely enough pocket money to keep a camera loaded, that photography first got its hooks into him. He’d already felt the pull of images years earlier, viewing “The Family of Man” and paging through the photo essays in LIFE magazine — but it was Liberia and Ethiopia that turned looking into doing. People who eventually saw his pictures told him he had an eye, and he was encouraged to keep shooting.
After the Peace Corps, he enrolled in graduate school in Indiana for a master’s degree in educational technology — practical training for a life and career working overseas. It was meant to be a means to an end. While in graduate school, one darkroom class turned into an addiction. On weekends he photographed small-town festivals in southern Indiana and shot roll after roll. A professor took notice of the work and made an introduction that changed everything, introducing Manning to Robert Gilka, the longtime director of photography at National Geographic, who started supplying him with Kodachrome film and processing, removing the financial barrier to making pictures.
Diploma in hand, Manning took a job as an educational media advisor at Amadou Bello University in northern Nigeria — and once his official work was done each day, he was out documenting Hausa culture with the film Gilka had given him.
Upon returning to the States, with a pregnant wife and no job prospects, Manning shared his Nigeria images with the communications department of a Fortune 500 company, who hired him to work in a large, award-winning photo department. He was thirty-one years old, with a young family and no formal training in commercial photography, and he was suddenly getting paid to make photos he wasn’t qualified for.
What followed was a self-taught education in commercial photography — large formats, lighting, the mechanics of fulfilling an assignment — learned the hard way, inspired and educated by studying masters like Ernst Haas and Richard Avedon, and then figuring it out on his own. His life has been, by his own description, a rollercoaster ever since: film to digital, documentary to commercial, hand-printed portfolios to the immediacy of the internet, and eventually to fine art.
As his commercial photography career wound down, affected by the pandemic, he began stepping out from behind the camera to make work that says something about who he is rather than what he’s been hired to show, from commercial products to fine art process.
He has never had formal training in photography, but he has spent most of his adult life doing little else. For the past seven years, he has studied the world of art through classes and workshops, and has exhibited in galleries throughout the United States.
website: lawrencemanning.com
instagram: @lawrence_manning_fine_art