Your name
Michael Young
Place of birth
Bronxville, NY, USA
Place where you live now
Scarsdale, NY, USA
3 words to describe you
inquisitive, reflective, perceptive
Why do you take pictures?
Within my artistic practice, my drive to make pictures always originates with a topic or theme that I cannot get out of my head. There has to be a (somewhat) obsessive desire on my part to understand and make sense of the world around me to get a project started.
Where do you get your inspiration?
I'm driven and inspired most when I find myself grappling with a theme or an idea–something I cannot get out of my head. When I find myself constantly asking "...but why?" or "how come...?" I know that I am about to embark on a new project.
I am also very much inspired by so many contemporary photographers and the stories they tell. I must confess that my relationship to collecting photo books may be bordering on obsessive; nevertheless, seeing how much leeway there is within the medium to make work and tell stories propels me forward.
Who are your influences?
I started my photography journey rather late, when I was in senior year at Yale. It was right after I had come out, and I was fortunate to take two courses taught by Catherine Opie. I don't know that I would have ever pursued photography were it not for her support and belief in my talent. Cathy taught me to take risks, believe in myself, and look outside of the photographic canon–in particular Northern Renaissance painters–for inspiration. While it's been over 20 years since I studied with her, so much of what she shared with me when I was 20 years old continues to inform my practice. As for contemporary photographers, I'm in love with the work of Alessandra Sanguinetti, Alec Soth, Judith Joy Ross, Mark Steinmetz, and so many others. (It pains me to not name them all.) Perhaps you will have to come over to my place and we can go through my photo library.
What determines the subject matter you choose?
It has to come from a sincere place and one that is personal. Yet at the same time I believe the project needs to have the ability to transcend my own fascination. When done right, the personal becomes universal. This idea was taught to me by the photographer Stacy Merhfar and it has helped me navigate projects.
What impact would you like your art to have?
I'd like my art to resonate with others. Perhaps a work or series connects with others on a visceral level where an image stays with them and they know they're not alone. Or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, the work challenges individuals to question their own beliefs with the hope of becoming more empathetic to those unlike themselves.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
Two series: Grays the Mountain Sends by Bryan Schutmaat and Sonata by Aaron Schuman
Is there anything you want to add?
Just a thank you for believing in my series and sharing it with your audience. I appreciate it.

Maybe Tomorrow
Project statement

Maybe Tomorrow is a decade-long, lyrical documentary project centered around my partner’s hometown in rural western Kentucky that explores the complexity of the meanings assigned to, or assumed of, the region by both its residents and outsiders. Curious about my partner Erik’s continued ambivalence about returning to his home after building a life here in New York, I began to photograph this community, which we return to every summer.

As a queer man from the Northeast, I was viewed as an outsider, sometimes with suspicion, sometimes with plain curiosity. In our uneasy shared gaze, we had not seen the likes of each other before. I discovered that inviting people to sit for a portrait became a point of connection and a point of entry to an unfamiliar world beyond my own that sometimes felt unsafe. Building on the portraits, I began to make landscapes and still lives to document where and how these individuals lived. The more I got to know this community–one that is still largely segregated–I had to grapple with, and resolve, my own personal prejudices about who these people were and what this region represented. My images and ideas about this place have grown beyond the initial ones of ruin and poverty, which punctuate the land. The longer I immersed myself in this world, the more I was able to see the complex relationships between the rough edges of rural life and the beauty of the landscape from which that life sprung, and the culture that seeks to preserve it.

This complexity manifested in my range of image subjects as I worked my way below the surface of notions of regional politics, history, and religion–a complicated convergence which celebrates, defines, and oftentimes traps a region and its people in unyielding identities, or forces those who don’t fit in to leave. But not without some sorrow. Maybe Tomorrow is ultimately an open-ended narrative about the ways in which place inevitably drives who we become and the ways in which we seek to understand the homes we can’t quite leave behind.

michael young
@hiddenglances