Michael Northrup

Michael Northrup is an American photographer who has consciously and with extreme precision and dedication steadily documented his family, friends, and personal sphere through photographs beginning in the 1970's.

These photos are incredibly recognizable for me.  They are my family, they are your family.  They are everyone you've ever met or no one you've ever met simultaneously.   My interest in family, the anatomy of family and personal space, the notion of home and the cherished (sacred) are all displayed here through seemingly simple photos which you might find looking through your grandmother's attic on a September afternoon; breeze and dust illuminated in the light between the slats on the tiny window.  This is nostalgia, but it is also a longing for a nostalgia that doesn't exist.

This family doesn't belong to me.  These friends don't belong to me.  These memories don't belong to me.  But somehow they do.  I feel like they're mine and that's the most interesting part of his work to me.  The impossible reconciliation between images that have nothing to do with me and the extremely personal effect they create in the viewer.

I'm really interested in nostalgia, manufactured memory, displaced memory, personal and private space vs. the public sphere, and also the inherent feeling of being a spy, a voyeur into someone else's life story.  The emotion that this creates is an odd and eerie combination that I try to create in my writing as well as photography that I've been working on where I focus on my immediate, most coveted and sacred spaces and people, but where I also try to incorporate an element of "unreality" or hyper reality which aims to suggest the concept of how we define "home" "family", other words and language that evoke "safe" while at the same time evoke strangeness or the unrecognizable.