MICHAEL FLOMAN

Michael Flomen was born in Montreal in 1952. He began making photographs in the late sixties and has been showing his work on several continents since 1972. He served as a darkroom printer and collaborator for many artists, including for the Jacques Henri Lartigue travelling exhibition that toured Canada and the United States in the mid seventies. Details, Flomen’s first book of street photographs, which was inspired by Henri Cartier Bresson’s formalist approach to picture taking, was published in 1980. Still Life Draped Stone, which includes twenty-six black and white street photographs, followed in 1985. Flomen switched to a large-format camera in the early nineties in order to photograph snow, a project that led to the publication Rising issued in 2000. For the last twenty years, this self-taught artist has been using cameraless techniques to work directly in nature. Natural elements, including water, the light emitted by fireflies, wind, and other natural phenomena are the inspiration for his picture making. Michael Flomen’s work is represented in thirty collections, including the George Eastman House, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Musée du Québec, the National Gallery of Canada, the Norton Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.