According to Levin, “there is no agenda” in his photographs. Still, there are influences, personal biases and a ranging curiousity that mark his images. The agenda that he waves away is the burden that black and white photography, indeed photography as a whole, carries with it always. The expecation to tell a truth and to link that truth to a larger whole. The photograph as document or drama, or both at once, is a compelling concern for many photographers. Cartier-Bresson said that his aim was “to preserve life in the act of living” while Ansel Adams saw his photographs as a means toward ecological preservation. Agendas abound.

Michael Levin is more guarded when discussing his work. He allows that he has an interest in things ‘that are not obvious’ and places that go ‘unnoticed’. The photographs themselves rise above his modesty. Scenes gain weight, even emotional power, as they move through his lens. In his early work – shot mostly around the Pacific Northwest with water, water everywhere – Levin leads the viewer to consider the value and form of wooden pilings, ferry docks and steel pipelines. In Posts and Shadows, weathered stumps from a once thriving riverfront cannery now stand like sentinels warning of time’s cruel passage. The objects become less about their own specificity than what Levin makes of them. Despite their exacting clarity, these subjects are loosened from their quotidian values to better serve Levin’s goal.

It is interesting to note that Steel Pier is the structural underbelly of America’s famed Atlantic City Pier – the thick concrete posts holding up all these cheap and passing fancies. All that weight for nothing. Levin makes something more of the scene, turning the accordion-like scroll of the posts (akin to the structure of a large-format camera) into a telescopic portal out toward infinity.

There is always something more going on in Michael Levin’s photographs than you first consider.

— (end of excerpt)

© Barry Dumka/BCREATIVE CONSULTING