Michael Flomen, born in Montreal, is a self-taught artist who began taking photographs in the late 1960s. He exhibited his first series of works, “Shaker Light” (on upstate New York Shaker architecture) in 1972. Since then, Flomen has shown his work regularly around the world,
For two decades, Flomen worked in the “decisive moment” style of street photography established by Henri Cartier-Bresson. The books “Details” and “Still Life Draped Stone” published in 1980 and 1985 respectively, document his extensive work in this field. In the early 1990s, Flomen started using large format cameras to photograph landscapes, specifically snow depositories and snow fields. In 1999, he started using camera-less techniques to make photographs directly in the wild. Natural elements such as water, wind, firefly light, and other natural phenomena are the inspiration for—and now the materials used in—his picture making.
Flomen’s work can be found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the George Eastman House (Rochester, NY), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Norton Museum of Fine Art (West Palm Beach, FL), the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Quebec, and the Hanmi Museum of Photography (Seoul), among others.