Biographical Material for Fine Art Photographer Michael Levin
Michael Levin has earned the top honour as International Photographer of the Year 3 times at the International Photography Awards in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited throughout Canada, the US, Europe and Asia and his first monograph, Zebrato (Dewi Lewis Publishing UK), is a perennial best-seller and available in its Third Edition.
EXCERPT:
There is a minimalist grandeur to a Michael Levin photograph that weds technical mastery with a more loose and lyrical expressiveness. So many sharply-detailed small moments that resonate as sturdy, spellbound and suggestive. Levin hews to the adventuring spirit of a 19th century journeyman photographer, an idealist carrying a second set of eyes who still sees the world for its evocative beauty and poetic allure. In telling an artistic story of the locations he finds, Levin shifts our perspective so that the lingering effect is less about an actual place than an emotional state – the landscape read as mood and memory, as places marked by longing and potential…
Still what has always marked Michael Levin’s photographs is their painterly quality – his scenes have an expressive purity and a self-contained life of their own. Now that he has introduced color into his collection, it’s interesting to consider Levin’s long admiration for the work of Mark Rothko. Color was a device for Rothko to inspire a range of intimate emotions – to draw the viewer in deeply to his fully immersive perspective and experience their own revelation. Levin uses his own palette of colors to similar effect – lustrous aquamarine blues, diffused yellows and pale muted tones that recall old postcards. The effect is captivating. In Levin’s nuanced handling, color becomes another lure toward a contemplative appreciation of a landscape.
In Tuileries Fountain the arc of people arrayed around the central fountain appear perfectly content as they daydream beneath the warm glow of an elegant pink cherry tree and a long row of greenish gray mansard roofs. For Dusk Versailles, Levin cools down his colors lending this nocturnal scene a quiet, jewel-toned elegance that proves engrossing.But the clarity in Levin’s purpose is most delicately evidenced in Sunshowers. Our eyes are first drawn to the graphic form of the undulating pier and the receding line of vertical bamboo posts – they seem to be the image’s central subject. But consider closely the vaporous layers of subtle color that float through the scene, the faint play of raindrops on the water and the crackling silver light starting to break through the lustrous fog that has enclosed this brilliant, fragmented moment. Levin is leading the viewer to a keener appreciation of the transformative opportunity still radiant in the world – not just all that endures and is timeless but the evanescent, transitory moments that are here for a startling minute and then gone forever. Except they remain, light-struck and wondrous, in Levin’s evocative prints.
