Photo Journal Monday: Michael Young
Reclining Cowboy, March 2021
Archival Pigment Print
© Michael Young
Photos and Writing by Michael Young
Michael Young is a lens-based artist whose work deals with masculinity, personal identity, and memory. He is a Top 10 winner of LensCulture Critics’ Choice 2022, a Top 50 artist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass 2021, and a winner of Feature Shoot’s 2021 Emerging Photography Award.
Hidden Glances is a series of photographic collages constructed from vintage gay pornographic calendars published between the years when I was beginning to recognize my sexuality as a youth until I came out.
Leather on Leather, February 2021
Archival Pigment Print
© Michael Young
Each collage is an amalgam of two images that originally appeared in the same calendar. One image has the male figure spliced from the scene and placed on top of the second image. Through the negative space of the absent figure, a censured portion of the figure beneath is revealed. The collage is then re-photographed bringing both layers onto the same seamless photographic plane.
These visual devices of compression of space, along with the duality of revealing and concealing, are essentially a metaphor for the numerous years when my gaze upon other men was tentative and fleeting, lest those stolen glimpses expose my silent, secret homosexuality.
Pickup Truck, June 2022 Archival Pigment Print
© Michael Young
The photographs remove the source material from their original intention—that of gratuitous imagery for sexual stimulation. A new narrative is constructed in which the viewer is invited to consider how pornography can be used to inform more reflective conversations about the male body, the coming-out process, and the struggles that so many gay men encounter in this context. The series comments upon universal themes of self-acceptance, personal secrets, and perceptions of societal norms causing lost time.
Karate Chop, August 2022
Archival Pigment Print
© Michael Young
