MICHAEL SEBASTIAN

In medicine, an incidental finding is something discovered while you're looking for something else, or expecting to find nothing at all. In either case, your eyes and mind are alive, through training and experience, to possibilities you didn't anticipate.

So it is with many of my photographs. These images have not yet found a home within a series or project, but seem to need a place of their own to be seen.

For the last several years I've driven a 52-mile commute to my medical practice in a small city in central Kentucky. I depart my suburban home, travel a busy stretch of interstate highway to my job, and reverse the trip at day's end. I traverse a lush, sparsely populated semi-rural landscape, marked by the presence of people I mostly don't see. I view their homes and playgrounds; their businesses and industrial sites; their rural hamlets and suburban shopping malls. Isolated within my car, apart from these unseen people, I already feel I'm The Other.

I drive, thinking of the day to come, or the day gone by, steering autonomically while my mind sifts what my eyes feed it. The siren calls of color, light, geometry, and form beckon me to stop to shoot at once, or to return later. I respond superficially to the many lovely scenes I encounter; who doesn't like a "pretty" picture? But I also sense the incongruities and oddities, and the manicured faux-perfection that betrays the human impulse to impose order around oneself. However I approach, I photograph as an interloper in places where I rarely feel fully at home. This tension, between visual attraction and emotional discomfort, is why I've returned time and again, camera on the seat beside me.

The vague anxiety this tension provokes prods me to shoot quickly, and return to the familiar confines of the car. But "quick" isn't so easy when wielding an eight-pound manual camera, or reloading rolls of film, each capable of only a handful of images. I've shot nearly all of this work on medium-format color-negative film for its ability to render complex, multi-dimensional information on a large plane of whatever emulsion best suits the day's light. But the cameras' physical heft and cumbersome operation are also soothing impediments to the task at hand. I must stop, compose, focus, and shoot; and though I don't linger, neither can I easily heed the voice that screams, "you don't belong here", and hasten back to the comfort of the commuter's hermetically-sealed isolation.

(pronounced echo-NAHM-uh-lips)

(work in progress)

I made my first-ever trip to Las Vegas in the autumn of 2010, as part of a family excursion through the American southwest. Like most first-time visitors to Vegas, I was taken aback by the crowds, the noise, the hubbub, and the glitz. But -- three years into the worldwide economalypse that started with the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008 -- I sensed in the ostentatious craziness a wary, muted quality; tensions were palpable beneath the façade. Watching Vegas at play, it seemed like an aging frat boy, still partying desperately into middle age, trying to keep up appearances and convince himself he's having fun. I knew I would have to return to explore this undercurrent further.

During the early years of the 21st century, Las Vegas was the fastest-growing metro area in the US. There was a job for anyone who wanted to work; housing all those workers meant new homes went up as fast as builders could drive the nails, and mortgage lenders could close the deals. But things that can't last, don't; when the housing bubble inevitably burst in 2008, Vegas became Ground Zero, the sad exemplar of a cratered economy. By some estimates, home prices fell over 50% from 2006's peak values; and as many as 80% of Vegas-metro mortgages were (are) underwater, with Nevada leading the nation in foreclosures since 2007.

It would be obvious simply to photograph the shuttered buildings and acres of unsold tract homes that bespatter the metro area; those are the physical manifestations of the Vegas economalypse. But beneath these encrustations of recent man-made history, there also remains the starkly beautiful, human-imprinted southern-Nevada desert, with its astonishing light and rich palette of colors. I have long had an interest in the built landscape, and in few places is it as photogenic as in this part of the American southwest.

What about the visitors, the tourists? Talking with cab drivers, bellhops, and others who perform the city's "small jobs", I'm told that they keep coming to Vegas -- as affirmed by the crowds we negotiated during our 2010 visit -- but that they are fewer in number, and spending far less money than in better times past. Despite the melted trillions of national wealth, people still need -- perhaps more than ever -- a getaway. But, walking along the Strip, there is the faintest whiff of threadbare fatigue about the environment. You can sense the unease behind the faces of the passersby, a discordant note in a city devoted to fantasy and gratification. This unease is what I felt so strongly; it's what I've started, and hope to continue, to explore as this project develops.

I was born in New Orleans, and grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Dallas, Texas. I starting making and developing photographs around age eight (thanks, Mr. Treat) using that old first-camera cliché, a Kodak Brownie. Once its brittle bakelite finally yielded to my clumsy ministrations, I graduated to a well-used Zeiss Ikon Contina with a broken light meter -- which further disappointed me by failing to bounce resiliently from concrete.

Undismayed, I wound up graduating from medical school and two residencies, photographing all the while around life's other obligations. Along the way, I married a Kentuckian and moved to Louisville to raise two children. When not shooting, I practice anesthesiology in central Kentucky, in roughly that order of precedence. Fortunately for both cameras and patients, I now drop things far less frequently.

If you want to ask a question, buy a print, license an image, or (even better) commission me for a project, I'm all ears.

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September 2012 Participating photographer in Flak Photo's Looking at the Land: 21st Century American Views

November 2011 Represented Fraction Magazine at the Lishui Photo Festival 2011 in Lishui, China, with images from 52 Miles

August 2011 Work-in-progress Economalypse featured on underexposed, blog by photographer / journalist Susan Burnstine

August 2011 Fraction Magazine show at Rayko Photo Center, San Francisco

December 2010 December featured photographer, One One Thousand, online journal of southern photography

November 2010 The New York Times Magazine, November 5, 2010: "Fantasy Politics", photograph accompanying essay

August 2010 Critical Mass 2010 Finalist

July 2010 Featured on Flak Photo as part of their Review Santa Fe series

June 2010 Review Santa Fe 2010 with "52 Miles"

April-May 2010 photographer in the Griffin Museum Virtual Gallery (download annual report for listing)

December 2009 featured on Academy A, blog by Jeffrey Michael Smith

November 2009 featured on Shooting Wide Open, blog by Jin Zhu

November 2009 featured on Lenscratch, blog by Aline Smithson

Fall 2009 Group Portraiture exhibition, Center For Fine Art Photography, Ft. Collins, Colorado, juried by Mary Ellen Mark

May 2009 "Natural Geometries", Fraction Magazine issue 7

Jan 2009 Group Portraiture Exhibition, "My World Is A Family", Perm, Russia; part of the Louisville/Perm Sister Cities program

Jan-Feb 2007 Solo Exhibition, "Winter Works", Deven7 Studios, Louisville

Jan-Feb 2006 Solo Exhibition, "Introductions", Kentucky Center for the Arts, Louisville

November 2005 "LaGrange", photos accompanying feature article, Kentucky Monthly magazine

Commissions, Prints, or Licensing

I welcome inquiries about commissioned work, and I look forward to working with you to translate your project ideas into beautiful images. This is what really gets me excited, so let me hear from you.

You can also purchase fine prints of most of the images on this site. Prints are made in-house with pigment inks on archival papers; if properly displayed and protected, they will last a very long time. I can also make color dye-sublimation prints on substrates of masonite, medium-density fiberboard (MDF), or aluminum. These prints are ready to display without further matting or framing, for a very clean, minimalist presentation. I have several color photographs displayed this way in my home, and they are spectacular.

Most images on this site are also available for licensing. Licensing grants the use of an image for a defined purpose, time limit, geographic distribution, and circulation. These factors together determine the price. I retain the copyright for all licensed images.

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Obligatory Copyright Warning!

All text and images on this site are ©Michael Sebastian. All rights are reserved. Images on this site are registered with the United States Copyright Office. They may not be used for any purpose without written permission.

To do so is a violation of copyright law, and may result in your being hurled from the Tarpeian Rock, among other undesirable outcomes.

No, not that kind of privacy---though I definitely won't share your personal information with third parties without your opt-in consent.

I've been accosted so many times while photographing that I created this page, to have a place to which to refer those people who insist, with varying degrees of rudeness, that I can't photograph them or their property in public view.

I'm a photographer, not a lawyer, so what follows on this page is my informed-layman's understanding of privacy / publicity law. If you want a lawyer's take, I can recommend Bert Krages. He specializes in privacy and intellectual-property law, and has written widely on these subjects.

To put it simply, if you are out in public, you have no expectation of privacy. You, your children (regardless of age), or your property can be photographed at any time, with or without your consent. The resulting photographs can be published in any form, without your permission, and without compensation. Most people don't realize this, and it comes as something of a shock to read it. But it's true. (How do you think the government gets away with all those surveillance and traffic cameras; or paparazzi, with embarrassing celebrity photos?)

I can't trespass or impede your free movement in order to photograph you or your property. I also can't photograph you when you reasonably do have an expectation of privacy---such as standing inside your home undressing, while I'm perched outside your window like some vile peeping Tom. And property owners have the right to restrict photography on their premises.

There are some restrictions on my use of the images. I cannot use photographs of you to portray you in a false light. I can't photograph you, let's say, as you walk in front of a brothel, and publish the images in a way that falsely implies you're a patron rather than a pedestrian. Additionally, I can't use your image to imply your endorsement of a product or a cause---such as in an ad for condoms or cornflakes. For such commercial use, I'd need your written permission in the form of a release, which delineates the terms of that use, and your compensation for it. But most other uses are fair game.

Furthermore, you certainly have no right to demand I desist. Nor may you demand, or attempt to seize, my memory cards or film, nor impede my activity. That's harrassment, which can get you arrested. And if you place a hand on me, you've committed battery, and that also can get you arrested.

I have no wish to bother anyone while I photograph. Neither, though, do I wish to be bothered while engaging in a harmless and perfectly legal pursuit. Therefore, I suggest -- if you see someone publicly making photographs, and you believe s/he is doing something illegal -- that you report it to the police. The subsequent conversation will be educational for everyone involved.