©Michael Young, Bard Hill Road, 2023

This week, we will be exploring projects inspired by intimacy and memory. Today, we’ll be looking at Michael Young’s series Maybe Tomorrow.

I first came across Michael Young’s work with the series Hidden Glances. His expert use of collage to play with personal concepts between the visible and invisible made me take note. I later came across Maybe Tomorrow while researching how other artists are working with ideas of home. While in graduate school I found myself transplanted from the Midwest to the South. This struggle between attempting to find my place and continuously feeling out of place; understanding how identity is tied to location; and better understanding the intrinsic associations of race in the South all came flooding back to my mind when I saw this series. Michael is able to create these intimate moments with the residents of a place he is not from, his partner’s hometown. The resulting images of conversations, portraits, and explorations are reflective of larger humanity, the small moments we can find with photography. I can’t wait to see his upcoming publication of Hidden Glances this Fall.

©Michael Young, Two Eriks and Pamela, 2018

Michael Young is a lens-based artist whose work explores themes of masculinity, personal identity, community, and memory. He has been named a Top 50 artist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass (2023 & 2021), a Top 10 winner of LensCulture Critics’ Choice, and a winner of Feature Shoot’s Emerging Photography Award.

Recent shows include CURRENTS 2023 at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, a solo exhibition at the Rochester Museum of Art (New Hampshire), Candela’s Unbound12! and Una historia (no) tan rosa at Archivo Arkhé in Madrid. Young’s images have also been exhibited in Portfolio 2023 at Atlanta Photography Group, Art of Pride at Southeast Center for Photography, Bodily Autonomies at Queer Festival Heidelberg, Center Forward 2022 at Center for Fine Art Photography, and Context 2022 at Filter Photo.

Young’s work has been published in both issues of GUP’s Fresh Eyes 2023 (Documentary and Conceptual), Musée Magazine, Fisheye, and two issues of Der Greif. Online features, articles, interviews, and shows include LensCulture, Humble Arts Foundation, Fraction Magazine, Talking Photographs, The Guardian, Float, and F-Stop Magazine.

Follow Michael on Instagram at: @hiddenglances

©Michael Young, Starla in her Photography Studio, 2018

Maybe Tomorrow

Maybe Tomorrow is a long term, 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 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, The Spit, 2019

©Michael Young, Arianah, 2023

©Michael Young, Abandoned Playhouse in the Woods, 2022

©Michael Young, Girl in Owensboro, 2022

©Michael Young, Owen (Underwater), 2018

©Michael Young, Miss Muhlenberg Pageant (Swimsuits), 2022

©Michael Young, Alivia (Shooting), 2022

©Michael Young, Kaden in his Bedroom, 2023

©Michael Young, Three Baptist Church Signs and Shelton’s Tires, 2023

©Michael Young, Landon, 2022

©Michael Young, Pamela, 2018

©Michael Young, McDonald’s, Tornado Shelter, and Homes, 2023

Epiphany Knedler is an interdisciplinary artist + educator exploring the ways we engage with history. She graduated from the University of South Dakota with a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Political Science and completed her MFA in Studio Art at East Carolina University. She is based in Aberdeen, South Dakota, serving as a Lecturer of Art and the co-curator for the art collective Midwest Nice Art. Her work has been exhibited in the New York Times, Vermont Center for Photography, Lenscratch, Dek Unu Arts, and awarded through the Lucie Foundation, F-Stop Magazine, and Photolucida Critical Mass.

Follow Epiphany Knedler on Instagram: @epiphanysk