I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1959 and I’ve never moved away. A providential conspiracy seems to have been at work in the convergence of friends and events that led me to photography and to the college in Kentucky where I wound up studying photography. This is where I came to love pictures. It
was the end of the 1970’s. At that time I didn’t plan to be doing photography for a living, actually—I had no plan. I worked as a janitor, a dishwasher, a laborer, a darkroom technician and eventually as a photographer’s assistant (although I don’t think I was very helpful).

All the while I kept making pictures. In 1984, I published my first book of photographs and writing entitled, Heads Bowed Eyes Closed, No One Looking Around.

A girl named Marilyn, whose portrait I had taken some years earlier, wrote me from New York where she was living at the time and before long we got married. It was almost exactly the middle of the 1980’s.

Nearly clueless, but with little to lose and a wife not afraid, I quit my real job in 1987 to go freelance
as a photographer. Twenty-eight years now into the adventure, much has changed—both in and out of photography. What hasn’t changed, however, is that strong pictures still resonate and compel and I am grateful to still be in search of them.

inquiries: 
michaelwilson@fuse.net 
513.289.3855