“I’m young, scrappy and hungry and I’m not throwing away my shot!”

— Alexander Hamilton, The Musical

HAMILTON is a cast of revolutionaries. Night after night, this band of young rebels raise their voices to the darkness in an inspiring uprising of song and spirit. They are at once our history and our future, inciting rebellion and leading the way to change.

Like the revolutionaries who embraced Alexander Hamilton’s vision for a new America, the remarkable actors in these photographs embraced Lin-Manuel Miranda’s vision for a new American musical. In doing so, they upended expectations and made us see things differently.

I captured their portraits using antique cameras and lenses. To bring a richness and timeless beauty to these images, I chose to print them in classic silver gelatin, still the gold standard for black and white printing. All in an effort to echo, in a small way, what ‘Hamilton the Musical’ so brilliantly achieves in enlivening our own history in a way that makes it so relevant and present for us today.

This is a time when history is being made in ways that our forefathers could never have imagined. It celebrates and reverberates this history eight times a week in cities across America. This is MY SHOT.

—Josh Lehrer

Josh Lehrer’s photographs have appeared all over New York in galleries and exhibitions, as well as on billboards and in subway stations. Whether it is the chaos of homelessness, celebrity, propulsive success, or projected sentiment; capturing the individual, their unique survival strengths, and the sudden discovery of calm in the center of personal storms drives Josh’s portraiture.

His clients are indie films, business leaders, Broadway blockbusters, screen stars, and large commercial enterprises.

With an eye toward social justice, Josh created the series, “Becoming Visible,” focused on New York City’s fastest-growing homeless population: transgender teenagers. In 2010, the first of these images premiered at the Robert Miller Gallery and have since appeared in galleries and museums all over the world. The series garnered the 2010 Photo Philanthropy award and was a centerpiece of Photoville in 2012.

Josh lives and works on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and is a graduate of Boston University’s School for the Arts and The International Center of Photography.