Walter Lehrman was born and raised in the Bronx, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. During WWII he was in the Army Air Force, a radio operator on a B-29. He was at Okinawa, preparing for the invasion of Japan's home islands, when the war ended.

Back home in New York, he received both his Bachelors and Masters degrees from Columbia. In 1951, he married Jinny Baker, a Greenwich Village art student and model, and together they moved to Berkeley, where Walter, having been offered a teaching assistantship, took up graduate studies in the University of California English department.

In Berkeley, the Lehrmans became friends with Allen Ginsberg (also at the UC Berkeley English department), Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac. Walter was on hand for the Six Gallery poetry reading in 1955, and, inspired by the performances of his friends, began photographing them at subsequent events, parties, and impromptu portrait sessions.

In 1956, the Lehrmans left Berkeley for Ohio when Walter took an English instructor's position at the University of Akron. At the same time, Gary Snyder left Berkeley for Japan; Jack Kerouac headed for Desolation Peak; Allen Ginsberg shipped out as a merchant seaman; and Philip Whalen departed for Newport, Oregon. It was the end of "the Dharma Bums" period, but Lehrman had managed to capture several of the main characters on film.

Walter Lehrman taught English at the University of Akron until 1986, retiring as an Associate Professor. During his academic career, his photographs remained in storage, only resurfacing in the 1990s with the resurgence of popular interest in the Beats.

Mr. Lehrman lives in Akron, Ohio, with his daughter, Elizabeth Raptis.

John Suiter is a writer and photographer currently (2015) living in Chicago. He first became acquainted with Walter Lehrman and his work during production on A Jack Kerouac CD-ROMnibus, a 1995 multi-media project which highlighted several of Lehrman’s photographs, and on which Suiter was Associate Producer. In 2002, Suiter used Lehrman’s portrait of Jack Kerouac, with permission, in his book Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades. In 2009 Suiter became Lehrman’s agent and printer. He began having high resolution digital master scans of Lehrman’s original negatives made, and created a series of inkjet digital prints of Lehrman’s images that were exhibited at USU’s Nora Eccles Harrison Museum in 2014.