Photography by Michael Mulley
Buffalo, New York
Artist Bio / Resume
"People Like You" Photographs by Michael Mulley
Exhibit Proposal:
"People Like You” is an ongoing photography project that I began in 1988. Since that time I have amassed dozens of portraits to this collection. Sometimes posed, sometimes without their knowledge I try to capture people in what I like to call “a moment of purity,” the quiet moments of people in their everyday lives when their guard is down.
In a time wIth so much divisiveness in our Country I hope that my work will speak to what we all have in common. This shared lifetime of experiences and the knowledge that rich or poor, rural or urban we all want the same things out of life.
The exhibit consists of 10-15 20x30 photographs framed to 26x36 and 15-20 11x14 photographs framed to 16x20
"County Fair, Batavia NY 1988
Photographer's rarely regret the photographs they take, they do sometimes regret the ones they don't take and that they can haunt you for years. I will never forget waiting for a train in Chicago as a lady was scratching lottery tickets and as she finished one and went to the next she would go to her knees and raise her hands in prayer. During the same trip the photo of the 70 year old African- American man his face creased with age sitting in his records store reading the paper with a headline about the 2000 Presidential election and the Florida recount will always count as "Ones that got away"
This exhibit is a celebration of the times I did push the button at exactly the right moment. Even though many are posed the most powerful ones are usually those simple, lone moments when they were unaware that someone was looking. These portraits catch all kinds of people in an all kinds of places over the last 30 years.
On the streets of New York City, a carnival in rural upstate New York, a freezing day in Buffalo waiting for a bus I was there capturing people at those quiet times thus depriving them the opportunity to put up a facade. When I catch them in the purity of the moment with no way to react to my camera I feel that I have the ability to make the most powerful images.
In the early days of portraiture the photographer would use a brace to hold the subjects head in place so they wouldn’t move during the long exposures that were common at the time. I think that today many people think of portraits in the same way as a static moment in a sedentary life.
This is only one way to think of what a portrait is and while there's nothing wrong with capturing a subject's gaze in front of a backdrop with the camera a few feet away I think that more is to be gained when you capture people in their environment.
Maybe it comes from the fast paced world we live in today that has affected the way we look at portraiture,but I think you can learn more about people by photographing them without the mask that they wear when they know someone is looking. Michael Mulley (9/26/23)