Examples of photographers artist statements for photography

Artist BIO:

Michael has spent his years capturing the still image of people, cultures, and landscapes from around the world, to around the block, with a very unique and distinctive style. A native Californian, Michael resides in Los Angeles, though equally at home trudging through Redwood forests, riding the rails deep into Siberia, or navigating the chaotic streets of Tokyo. He photographs with many types of cameras and film, from a clunky toy camera to the latest digital model, using each as a tool for a specific use. Michael’s fine art imagery has garnered recognition from the International Photography Awards, the Prix de la Photographie in Paris, Photographers Forum, and Critical Mass. His work has been published in Harper's, Black & White (U.S.), Black & White (U.K.), Seities, Esquire (Russia), New Statesman, Blur, Adore Noir, Fraction, SHOTS, Diffusion Annual, and Lenscratch. He also continues to exhibit his work internationally in both solo and group exhibitions, including prints in the public collection of the Wende Museum in Los Angeles, California, and the Lishui Photography Museum in Lishui, China. Michael was also an active Board Member for the L.A. chapter of the American Photographic Artists from and was Editor at Blur Magazine from - Currently, he is also Editor in Chief at Analog Forever Magazine, Founding Editor at Catalyst: Interviews, Contributing Editor for the One Twelve Publishing online column, Traverse, and Co-Host of The Diffusion Tapes podcast. The wisest words Michael ever gleaned from his father were to do what you love as your life’s work. Truer words have never been spoken.

Artist STATEMENT:

While out making photographs, I spend a great deal of time trying to see things in a less literal way. I use this time to take all the variables and elements into consideration. I firmly believe this to be essential and a key part of my process of capturing an image. I tend to work on sever

I photograph my children growing up in the same town I did.  Many of the pictures are intimate, some are fictions and some are fantastic but most are of ordinary things every mother has seen; a wet bed, bloody nose, candy cigarettes.   They dress up, they pout and posture, they paint their bodies, they dive like otters into the dark river.

They have been involved in the creative process since infancy.  At times, it is difficult to say exactly who makes the pictures.  Some are gifts to me from my children: gifts that come in a moment so fleeting as to resemble the touch of an angel’s wing.  I pray for that angel to come to us when I set the camera up knowing that there is not one good picture in five hot acres.  We put ourselves into a state of grace we hope is deserving of reward and it is a state of grace with the Angel of Chance.

When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths ‘told slant,’ just as Emily Dickinson commanded.  We are spinning a story of what it is to grow up.  It is a complicated story and sometimes we try to take on the grand themes: anger, love, death, sensuality and beauty.  But we tell it all without fear and without shame.

Memory is the primary instrument, the inexhaustible nutrient source; these photographs open doors into the past but they also allow a look into the future.  In Beckett’s Endgame, Hamm tells a story about visiting a madman in his cell.  Hamm dragged him to the window and exhorted; ‘Look! There!  All that rising corn! And there!  Look!  The sails of the herring fleet!  All that loveliness!” But the madman turned away.  All he’d seen was ashes.

There’s the paradox; we see the beauty and we see the dark side of things; the cornfields, the full sails, but the ashes as well.  The Japanese have a word for this dual perception; mono no aware.  It means something like ‘beauty tinged with sadness.’  How is it that we must hold what we love tight to us, against our very bones, knowing we must also, when the

It is well to remember that a picture before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote - is essentially a plane covered with colors assembled in a certain order. - Maurice Denis’s famed dictum documented in Herschel B. Chipp’s Theories of Modern Art

My work is grouped into series that explore various ways to abstract reality by photographic means: various ways to cover the plane of a camera sensor with colors assembled in a certain order. I have used light, motion, context, reflection, transparency, and focus as agents of abstraction. Most recently, I am combining various agents of abstraction. I combine reflection with movement capture, for example, for even more interesting discoveries. I am searching for the visual essence of what we see around us.

We have become used to the stylistic conventions of photography. My photographic work breaks the rules of what people expect photographs to be. I push the limitations of the camera and photograph where others do not think a photographic capture is possible. I look for color interactions, texture, and the elements of form and line, all of them interacting with ephemeral qualities of light. I am unconcerned with the detail that one expects in a photograph.

Now, using my most recent agent of abstraction, the movement capture technique, I am no longer just discovering photographic compositions, I am creating them. I can create my own elements and textures in a photographic composition. Moving my camera at time of capture, I can add my spontaneous physical response to the composition that exists before me. I have become a performance artist, a dancer, a painter, and a creator in the photographic realm. I can create new reality while also documenting it. I feel strongly the connection between photography and other forms of art.

I am a print maker. My finished work is a tangible photographic print. I align myself with painters rather than digital artists whose work is trapped in a digit

I think one of my favorite quotes may sum up how I feel about my photography (and life in general):

We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are. - Anaïs Nin

My art is a journey of self-discovery and self-expression. It is the process by which I choose to explore the people, things and world around me. I am fascinated by the subjective nature of events, how two people can have exactly the same encounter and have radically different interpretations and place different values on them. My experiences are both a source of pain and joy – my source of inquiry and inspiration. They are what I tap into when creating my art.

As a fine art photographer and someone who has purchased fine art photos to hang on my own walls, I have often pondered what makes someone buy a piece of art to hang on their wall and look at it every day for years on end. Trying to answer that question helps me create meaningful work and sharpen my creative vision.

I don’t believe the answer hinges on the “quality” of the photo – whether it is bad, good or great, since one’s opinion on what makes a great image is not only endlessly debatable but very personal. What seems to be more is relevant than the subjective quality of an image is how personally compelling that image is to someone and how that image triggers emotions in the viewer. The more “successful” (i.e. popular) the image, the more it resonates with the collective memory, acting as an emotional Rorschach test that triggers many similar universal feelings in different people.

For me, it is also helpful to define, as a kind of Litmus test of the work I do, what are some of the structural elements that contribute to a compelling image. I believe a “successful” image is one that shows, in a powerful way, something you see every day or something you’ve never really seen before and does so in a way that resonates emotionally with something deep inside the us; A bird flying above sunflowers may represent someone’s yearning fo