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Michael is an experienced and versatile landscape photographer who has been working in monochrome and colour for thirty years. He is Past-President of the Toronto Focal Forum. His pictures have been shown in Toronto, Collingwood and Flesherton, and are held in private collections.
His work focuses on the patterns and shapes to be found in natural objects and places. Photographs, by their very nature, start with the real. By emphasizing design and shape, Michael invites the viewer to move past the surface plane of reality, and engage with the deeper, more abstract elements in the image. Many of his images are presented in monochrome, specifically to remove the apparent reality that colour provides. Even relatively straightforward landscapes are composed to bring out the design that is sometimes obscured in real life.
A photograph can be a picture of something – a record, the result of just looking. It can also be the result of seeing, at which point the image can transcend the apparent subject. When the image is relatively abstract, the viewer has to engage with the picture to make sense of it. Different viewers will get different things out of the same picture, depending on what they bring to this engagement.
The Rockscape series consists of images of rocks where the perspective is so ambiguous that any objective scale and reality are lost, freeing the viewer to concentrate on shape and texture. They are also about movement – the dynamic processes that cause rocks to deform, flow, mix together and erode. An exposure that takes a fraction of a second gives us a window into events that took place over countless millennia.
These pictures are intended to be enigmatic and possibly challenging.
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