Michelle Leftheris, Nowspace (Tre Chieli), 2024

Michelle Leftheris: Time, Nature & Technology

Over the past few weeks, I have interviewed three different photographers whom I chose because of their work related to the environment. As I studied their work and asked them questions, the more it resonated; they are all searching for a larger truth through imagery and their use of the camera. The work they create connects to personal, historical, and scientific meanings, as well as mere curiosity. It is about sustaining nature while also seeking a connection and a more profound understanding, working towards symbolic production. 

Today, I will introduce Michelle Leftheris’ work.

Michelle Leftheris uses photography not only as a tool for observation but also as a way to mark time, embrace slowness, and draw the viewer into a deeper awareness of the present moment. Rooted in a lens-based practice, the work transcends traditional image-making by merging digital technologies, personal archives, and environmental sensitivity. Through the ongoing projects Nowspace and Book of Hours, Michelle navigates technosocial spaces and our relationship between physical and virtual worlds. She does this by crafting contemplative spaces within the often disorienting landscape of the internet. These projects prompt viewers to pause, linger, and connect with unremarkable moments in quiet, intimate ways, whether through streaming skyward views from webcams across the globe or through metadata-sorted image archives. What emerges is a poetic, responsive practice grounded in care, memory, and attention. Below is my interview with Michelle, in which she discusses her work and her habitual ways of engaging with time, nature, and technology.

-Sarah Knobel

Michelle Leftheris, Nowspace (4 Corners) 04-07-2023 09:45:47 EST, 2023-present

Sarah Knobel: On a fundamental level, we understand that photographs capture a fleeting moment—an instant that has already passed. They also navigate the relationship between space and place, rendering each through the lens of perception. Your recent work seems to engage deeply with this foundational concept: what might initially appear straightforward documentation becomes layered, contemplative, and complex. Both The Book of Hours and Nowspace seem to meditate on space and time, as you eloquently put it, offering “repeated and prolonged observations while celebrating the vastness of the natural world and providing an opportunity to linger in each moment of now.” Could you elaborate on how each series explores this idea?

Michelle Leftheris: They contend with the passage of time, not in broad strokes but more like a series of blinks. The thing that I enjoy most about photography is the deliberate act of looking. Once you press the shutter and commit that moment to image, the photograph becomes both an artifact of that act of looking and a promise of a return to that moment at some point in the future. In both works, I use photographic images to divert attention to the present.

Nowspace is a web-based project, a collection of live-streaming video collages containing footage from cameras pointed skyward worldwide. Created out of climate anxiety and feelings of isolation during the pandemic, I wanted a way to experience the expanse and totality of the Earth in a suspended state of time and place. So I started using a camera simply as an apparatus for looking and a means for drawing attention to the present, without concern for creating any kind of documentation. I found that as the weight of the moment presents itself, it provides a strange comfort in the way everything seems to slow down under the watch of an unblinking eye.

Book of Hours is also web-based. Based on the popular medieval Christian prayer books used by laypeople to pray at the canonical hours of the day, it is a contemplation on each hour, constructed through images left to obscurity in the depths of my devices and directories. Using metadata as the only organizing principle, images are sorted by creation time, which, in many cases, is the only context for the image itself, as I’ve often forgotten the details of its origin. Functioning like a clock, the viewer enters the site at the current hour of their local time and can scroll through the hours of the day and night.

Each hour is comprised of images created at the corresponding time from my archive. Book of Hours catalogs fleeting moments of reflection, observation, or trains of thought that have trailed away and coalesces them into a mechanism for marking time through unremarkable moments. 

Michelle Leftheris, Book of Hours (Prime, 07:00, Winter), 2025

SK: How do you envision your audience connecting with the work? Are there particular emotional, intellectual, or sensory responses you hope to evoke?

ML: Presenting both projects primarily online has been pivotal in shaping my perspective on how they are experienced. The web is a strange location where so many aspects of life are collapsed into one space –  shopping, banking, researching, listening to music, reading news, etc., all on the same screen. Most of those interactions are designed to be relatively the same. I want to interrupt that flow and introduce a different kind of engagement with being online, capitalizing on the intimate viewing experience – one that is generally solitary, accessible at any time, and with the viewer’s face close to the screen.

Michelle Leftheris, Nowspace (Looking West, Looking East) 10-23-2024 18:43:58; L to R : Grand Forks, North Dakota looking west; Grand Forks, North Dakota looking east; 2024-present

With Nowspace, the emphasis is on holding someone in a state of suspension, both in time and place, which happens so much already online – we’re constantly communicating across time zones and borders without even thinking about it. I also wanted to create an online space that was linked to the natural world. Typically, being on a screen is the antithesis of connecting to the environment, so I wanted to explore whether I could change that and use the opportunities inherent to a web-based experience, such as the ability to stream video in real-time in many different places, to create a connection. 

In Book of Hours, I set out to mine my archive of images to envision how an accumulation of small moments can transform into a larger apparatus for keeping time. I really connected with the structure of the medieval books of hours and how every canonical hour was associated with larger, existential themes, and wondered if my archive would also reflect that. As I began to cull the images based on capture time, I saw threads emerge. When the work is viewed, I want the audience to connect the pictures they’re seeing to the current time of day they’re experiencing and hopefully locate themselves in that moment. The pool of images I’m working with is extensive, so the photos change with the seasons, reflecting an even larger cycle of time and encouraging repeated viewings for a different experience throughout the year. 

Michelle Leftheris, Book of Hours (Terce, 09:00, Summer), 2025

All in all, I aim to create an online experience that doesn’t pull the audience out of their physical environment and into a virtual escape. Instead, I want to slow them down a beat and give them a gentle nudge toward being present in the moment and in the place where they are.

SK: The digital realm plays a significant role in your practice. In some ways, your work evokes artists like Jason Salavon or Refik Anadol, who also explore themes of algorithmic systems, digital data, and our oversaturation with images. Yet your work strikes a different chord—it’s intimate, emotionally resonant, and speaks to a profoundly personal relationship with the virtual. It feels as though you’re exploring not just our immersion in the digital but the lived experience of simultaneously inhabiting both physical and virtual worlds. Would you say that’s an accurate interpretation? How would you describe the digital or virtual dimensions of your work?

ML: Yes, very accurate! I’m always trying to balance physical and virtual worlds. I’m interested in how we are shaped by technology and the ways that it overrides our natural systems of memory, recall, and observation. The idea for Book of Hours originated from my reaction to the “on this day” feature found on most phones or social media, where an algorithm mines your stored images or posts and displays them to you several years after the fact. This uninvited recall provokes a range of reactions in me, from delight at being reminded of a time I’m happy to revisit  to devastation at having to confront a moment of loss. This “auxiliary memory” is incredibly unnerving to me. Understanding that memory recall is often linked to external triggers, such as hearing a song or smelling a particular scent, the decontextualized recollection generated algorithmically feels like an intrusive attempt to override our existing neural networks.  The auxiliary memory operates independently of the individual’s interior world – no external stimulus, no correlation, just data driving the content. This is currently the fundamental practice across various disciplines where data is the primary criterion for evaluating experiences. I wanted to dig into that a bit more to see what value there is in that approach, as well as what it overlooks.

Michelle Leftheris, Book of Hours (Vespers, 20:00, Winter), 2025

“On this day” also featured plenty of cryptic posts or images that I didn’t even remember taking and could no longer contextualize. This became the content I was most interested in. What could I make of all of these inconsequential images and moments? Why had I documented them in the first place? What can they add up to?

Nowspace is about the access that technology can provide and what can be done with that access. Many live streams are just cameras staring out into the world, like portals or open windows. I found that they could possess the power to transport me to another place, allowing me to have a quiet, focused, and intimate viewing experience. I focused most on the streams that depicted a natural environment. These streams allowed me to visit those places and observe them for as long as I liked without the barrier of financial cost or ecological impact from travel. 

The web has specific characteristics that resonate with the conceptual ideas I’m interested in, such as the capacity for simultaneous access around the world and the use of time as a material. Both projects invite multiple viewings and checking in on them over extended periods of time. I guess it’s a way to break away from the large platform-based engagement we have with so much online content.

I’m not interested in showing off what technology can do or has done. I’ve never been interested in showcasing technology, but rather in the ways that it continues to shape and define our individual experiences. My goal is to find a way to identify and use aspects of technology that can help us stay human and connected to the rhythms of the natural world.

Michelle Leftheris, Nowspace (4 Corners) 04-08-2025 18:23:03 EST, 2023-present

SK: At its core, your practice is grounded in photography. Could you share how your background in photography informs this work? What led you to this point in your practice, and what empowered this particular direction?

ML: When I was around 12, a relative gave me an old Canon A-1, which I didn’t know how to use properly for a very long time. However, undeterred, I still took tons of pictures. I continued to play around with the medium, but was more focused on studying drawing and painting. When I was a sophomore in college, I got a job running machine prints at a mini-lab at a local camera store and eventually moved on to work at two more professional photo labs, first as a hand retoucher and then finally as a custom printer making high-end b/w and color enlarger prints. As the photo industry changed, I moved up to the digital department and worked as a digital retoucher and large-format inkjet printer. 

Working in the production photo industry for about seven years, I think that experience burnt me out on making straightforward prints in my own practice. I was always drawn to collage or unconventional methods of presentation. I also spent a considerable amount of time working with more ephemeral ways to deal with images like video and projection. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between images and objects in photography, especially in the current context where the average person isn’t printing their photos at all.

Ultimately, I classify myself as a lens-based artist since the camera is the one constant I can trace through the history of my practice. I shoot still images constantly and engage with a lot of physical material experimentation. Education wise, I studied traditional photography but then went on to study Digital Media in grad school, which gave me the literacy and confidence to pursue code-based projects. At the moment I’m trying to combine both aspects of my background. I’ve returned to shooting film and working in the darkroom along with continuing to work using real time data and web-based presentation.

Michelle Leftheris, Book of Hours (Vespers, 19:00, Summer), 2025, website

SK: Which of the two series came first? Can you describe how the work originated and how one body of work may have influenced or evolved alongside the other?

ML: The catalyst for this Nowspace occurred in the early spring of 2017. Animal Adventure Park, a zoo in Harpursville, NY, live-streamed a pregnant giraffe named April, capturing the internet’s attention as everyone watched and waited for her to give birth. It was my first experience with livestream cameras, and it had a profound effect on me. The slow, prolonged act of waiting and watching was transformative. Incidentally, I missed seeing April give birth, but my interest was sparked in the act of passive viewing. 

Michelle Leftheris, Nowspace (Looking West, Looking East) 10-24-2024 21:44:46; L to R : Grand Forks, North Dakota looking west; Grand Forks, North Dakota looking east; 2024-present

While researching Nowspace, I was interested in early instruments of navigation, astronomy, and timekeeping. I came across a book of sundial dial mottos that contained a compilation from across Europe. Immediately, I noticed that a large majority of the mottos revolved around mortality and seemed to serve as constant reminders of death that could strike at any moment. I often thought about how different our relationship with time would be if we were reminded of how short life is at every glance of the time. It was the way the finite period of a day on a sundial became a mirror for the progression of an entire life that resonated with me as a structure to investigate further. From there, I kept researching and thinking about my own relationship to time and time keeping and eventually Book of Hours started to take shape.

Michelle Leftheris, Book of Hours (None, 16:00, Summer), 2025

Both works are ongoing and require a certain amount of stewardship so I continue to work on them in the background while I move on to new projects. I love that they are not static but always changing and taking on new dimensions as time passes.

SK: You’ve mentioned that you’re working on a book version of The Book of Hours. How does the shift from digital presentation to a physical, printed format change the nature of the work? How does this transformation affect how the work is interpreted or experienced?

ML: The web version of this project, Book of Hours, delves into what a personal archive looks like when sifted via metadata sorted by capture time. It is immaterial, forever changeable, but also adheres to a rigid organizing principle dictated solely by metadata. While working this way, I made a lot of discoveries but found myself wanting to intervene, go against the data, and sequence the work in a more poetic way. The digital version of the work also excludes all images I’ve shot on film because of the lack of official capture time metadata. This is a loss because my early work is strictly film, and I’ve returned to actively shooting film over the last several years. So, I decided to create a physical version of the project that follows the same structure of a book of hours. However, the images are sequenced without regard for the time they were shot, but instead categorized by a mood or gesture that I associate with the different canonical hours. This is very much keeping with the way medieval book of hours would associate biblical themes and stories with particular times of the day. 

Michelle Leftheris, spread from This Day (Hasten Slowly from Chapter None 3pm), Inkjet, Risograph print, 2025

The book also introduces text drawn from those sundial mottos that were so germane to my early conception of the project.  I’ve ascribed a motto to each of the canonical hours. The handmade book will be released as a limited-run and will combine multiple printing methods.

 SK: I understand that environmental concerns, particularly climate change, are essential to you, and that your relationship with nature has shifted since your recent relocation. How has this change influenced your current work? In what ways does it inform your visual and conceptual approach?

ML: I grew up in the Mahoning Valley of Ohio, which is right in the middle of the Rust Belt, and continued to live in urban places until I moved from Brooklyn to Vermont in 2017. This marked a giant shift in my relationship to the environment and to the environment in my practice. I had never lived anywhere naturally beautiful or with any significant wilderness. Because the environment is so much more enmeshed with daily living here in Vermont, I’ve developed a deeper understanding of the rhythms of nature and have become much more sensitive to both the fragility,  power, and unpredictable character  of the natural world. Before moving here, I had never had much of an interest in landscape as a subject matter and preferred working in the highly controlled setting of the studio but since living here I’ve learned to approach projects with acceptance rather than control. This has opened up the way I work to be able to deal with the changeable nature of the livestreams in Nowspace for instance. At the beginning of that project, I was incredibly frustrated with being dependent on existing streams that I couldn’t control. Now I consider maintaining and replacing feeds when they disappear part of the stewardship of the work. It’s similar to walking through the woods in different seasons, where things appear and disappear all the time; it’s a constant state of upheaval, growth, and death.

Michelle Leftheris, Nowspace (Looking West, Looking East) 01-15-2025 11:06:21; L to R : Grand Forks, North Dakota looking west; Grand Forks, North Dakota looking east; 2024-present

Noticing these things on a micro level has helped me to contend with them at the macro level. Like many people, I’m gravely concerned about the state of the Earth, and like many people, I struggle to know how to reconcile the ecological crisis. Things move slowly here, and that has allowed me space and time to focus on the present to keep from getting completely overwhelmed when I think about the future.

Michelle Leftheris, Nowspace (4 Corners) 05-04-2023 09:37:22 EST, 2023 present

SK: What are you currently looking at for inspiration? Which artists, writers, or thinkers are shaping your thoughts right now?

ML: Someone told me once that you think differently when you walk so I take every chance I have to just roam around and listen to music. I did this alot when I lived in the city and still do it now in the country but it takes on a completely different dimension. 

After the severe floods in Vermont,  I read the book Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson and have kept rereading it periodically ever since. The writing is beautiful, and I really connect with the way she depicts the relationship between humans and the environment. I’ve also just started The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time by Jimena Canales.

Two photographers that I also have been spending a lot of time looking at lately are Rinko Kawauchi and Eliot Porter. I think I’m drawn to the quiet intimacy in both of their work. There’s a sense of balance between a deference to the existing wonders of the natural world and a keen sense of perception. 

Bio:
​​Michelle Leftheris is a lens-based artist working across multiple disciplines. Her work, generally rooted in photographic practice, often extends beyond traditional methods of production and presentation of the photographic image. She holds a BFA in photography from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in digital media from Rhode Island School of Design. Her work has been exhibited at galleries and museums nationally and internationally. She is currently an Associate  Professor of studio art at Middlebury College in Vermont.

You can view Michelle’s work on her website, https://www.michelleleft.com/, and instagram at @leftherism