Typically, the experience of creating environmental portraits of people reflect both an empathy for them and the culture that defines them. This workshop is based on learning how to discover and cultivate this essential understanding. Through lecture, discussion and critique of daily assignments, a framework in learning how to: work simply, respond to and control available, natural or portable single source studio lighting, recognize the importance of project management, edit and apply appropriate post production processing lead to the goal of portfolio quality results. Edited imagery will be printed by workshop lab staff on Moab’s Entrada Rag Natural or Bright papers. (Seminar sponsored by Moab)
A Moab Paper Master Photographer, Michael Soluri is a New York City based documentary photographer and a former professor of photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His work is often noted for visually translating the immediacy of people and place within challenging, restrictive or high-security technological environments typically encompassing complex (work) cultures. Assignments and projects have taken him into cultures across America, through Europe, India, Central and South America. Speaking Portuguese, he has had significant experience working and living in Brazil.
Soluri has created and contributed work for and been published in print and online national and international media like Wired, Wired UK, Time, National Geographic Adventure, Discover Magazine, Discover Unseen Universe, Discover: The History of Space Travel, BBC Horizons, New Scientist, Wunderwelt Wissen, Vanity Fair, GEO, NPR, NASA and Space.Com. Profiled in Photo District News and Space.Com for his expertise in the photography and editing of human and robotic space exploration. He has lectured at, among others, the Smithsonian Institute, the National Science Foundation, the Maine Desert Island Biological Institute and Art Quest’s InVision Photo Festival.
As a producer/director/DP he created a series of marketing videos for FORBES Inc. that featured, among others, Michael Dell, John Chalsty, Steve Forbes and Charles Schwab. For PBS’s NOVA documentary Hubble’s Amazing Rescue” Soluri provided additional HD camera support.
Soluri's most recent photographic project has been both portraying and documenting — with extraordinary access within multiple NASA flight center cultures — the shuttle labor force, astronaut crew and tools of the final mission that saved the Hubble Space Telescope.
At the Johnson Space Center, he exclusively portrayed — for Discover Magazine — the crew of STS 125 in the first creatively controlled portrait session of an astronaut crew in more than 20 years. The Chimera lighting company was a sponsor for this historic portrait and his Labor and Tools of Space Exploration since 2007.
Michael also served as a photographic consultant to the Commander and crew of STS 125 Atlantis by providing exclusive seminars on how to respond to and make more communicative, visually insightful photographs during their historic May 2009 mission in space at the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope.
As a result of these seminars and the crew’s space based photography, the editor of Aperture magazine invited Soluri to write: “Transcendence: Photographs by Space Shuttle Astronauts” which appeared in the spring 2011 edition of Aperture.
An expert on the astronaut photography of Project Apollo, Soluri provided photographic consultation for MoonFire, Taschen Publisher’s limited edition book (marking the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11’s first human lunar landing) based on Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon.
For the NASA History Office, Soluri was chosen to author Examining the Ionic and Re-discovering the Photography of Space Exploration in Context to the History of Photography published in “Remembering the Space Age” (2008) that commemorated the first fifty years of space exploration. He also presented his paper at NASA’s and the National Air and Space Museum’s Remembering the space age 50th anniversary conference held in Washington, DC at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Currently published in 9 languages and more than 30,000 sold copies, Soluri is co-author and picture editor of What’s Out There – Images from Here to the Edge of the Universe (Duncan Baird, 2005 - hardcover) and Cosmos - Images from Here to the Edge of the Universe (Duncan Baird, 2007 - paperback), where he secured Stephen Hawking to write the books’ forwards.
In 2014, the Smithsonian Institute’s National Air and Space Museum will be exhibiting Soluri’s documentary work on the labor and tools of the final shuttle mission to save the Hubble Space Telescope.
Michael’s book, Infinite Worlds is represented by Hannigan, Salky and Getzler, a New York based literary agency.
