Check Out Michael Lundgren’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Lundgren.

Hi Michael, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
My father gave me my first camera in 1986. He handed it to me and said rather reverently “This camera can turn the night into the day.” My 12-year-old self understood his invitation in two ways––find out how and be careful with it. As a teenager, I studied photography at a local community center in Rochester, New York and became enamored with the darkroom, as interesting to me as the act of picture making, because what I love about a photograph has less to do with what is in front of the camera and more to do with what exists in the print. I knew from that early age that I wanted to be a photographer and that there was some connection between my imagination and my desire to make pictures.

I enrolled as an undergraduate at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1993 and studied under a group of professors with widely different artistic intentions. I worked as a commercial photography assistant and printer in Rochester until I moved to the desert in 1999. In 2000 I began graduate work at Arizona State University and received an MFA in 2003.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Like all good things in life there were and still are challenges. The task I set for myself was to craft a photographic art which built upon past traditions while forging a new vision. This alone was enough of a challenge and to be honest the most rewarding and enjoyable part of the process. One of my mentors, Emmet Gowin once told me, that ‘your art comes from your own personal organic awareness, but your career is something entirely different.’ And what he meant was that success in my career was not to be conflated with a true honesty to my own development as an artist. This balance is difficult to achieve.

And on the way, one has to eat. For others out there on the same path, stay strong and committed. Do not compromise. I feel that the universe has always provided for me in times of most need and my trust in that alone helped me get to the place I am.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I was first drawn to the desert’s immensity and the fact that things remain a long time in that dry air. Everything is in the open, preserved in a way. In the beginning, I was most interested in getting into as wild a place as possible. And my earliest photographs reflect that. The further you travel into these desert spaces, however, the more you realize the extent of human habitation. One can find 1,000-year old artifacts next to 10-year old artifacts and there is this collision of thought. No matter how wild the place, someone else had been there before. And then there’s an element of the supernatural in these places. Phenomena that beguile the rational mind. My work is an effort to make photographs that reflect this complexity, melding beauty, the grotesque, ruin and magic into the same image or set of images.

Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
Sharing my work with others is a great source of happiness for me. Their reaction to the images fuels my own creativity and I am most happy when my creative self is active and inspired. Most of all, simple moments of awareness, watching a cloud, talking with a friend, walking the edge of a stream bring me such joy.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.michaeldlundgren.com
• Instagram: @likemundgren

Image Credits
Josh Loeser
Michael Lundgren