Michael Sela

Michael Sela

At age 17, Michael Sela decided to become the best photographer in the world. Equipped with a Pentax film camera his father gave him, he embarked on a journey with the sole purpose of pursuing this passion. In 2019 the journey took him to Japan, which became his home.

Sela's photographs express sentimental, and magical emotions, at the same time. His photographs are a means of connecting with a different, distant Japanese reality, which are also very intimate.

Sela is familiar with most of his photographed subjects; for him photography is capturing short moment at their side. Sela's closest friends are photographed in a designated space, emphasizing photographs are a memory of space as they are is a capture of time. In the words of Susan Sontag in her book 'On Photography': "All photographs are memento-mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's [or thing's] morality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."

Sela turns emotion and time into something tangible that he can see and experience over and over again, at will. Much like music preserved on a record. For him, his insistence of using a film camera in a digital age is a choosing to create without knowing the outcome. Every camera click is meaningful - a press of a finger from which there is no way back.

"I don't want viewers to know when a photo was taken - one year, or fifty years ago," says Sela. Therefore, he photographs in black and white as an expression of timelessness. People and light stands out as main themes of his work. Sela photographs the touch of light on skin, paying attention to geometry, allusion, romance, fragility, aesthetics and humanity.

- Bio written by Dr. Etty Glass Gisis