Light on Skin

At the age of 17, Michael Sela (born 1998) decided to become the best photographer in the world. Equipped with a Pentax film camera his father gave him, he embarks on a journey for the sole purpose of photography. This journey also takes place in Japan (2019), which becomes his home. 

Sela's photographs express sentimental and magical emotions at the same time. His photographs are a means of connecting with a different, distant Japanese reality, but which are also very intimate. He knows most of the people he photographs, and for him photography is capturing small moments in their midst. The people closest to him are photographed in a given space, because a photograph is a sliver of space as it is a sliver of time. In the words of Susan Sontag, from her book On Photography, "All photographs are memento-mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt."

In Sela's words, he turns emotion/time into something tangible that he can see and experience over and over again at will, much like music preserved on a record. For Sela, his persistence in using a film camera in a digital age is a choice without knowing its outcome. Every click is meaningful - a finger press from which there is no way back. The black and white photography is an expression of timelessness. "I don't want them to know when the photo was taken - a year ago, or fifty years ago," says Sela. Besides the presence of people, the element of light stands out in his work. Sela does not use a light meter. He directs the light itself and creates soft, caressing lighting. "I adjust the aperture according to my eye and the extent to which I have to close my eyes, for example, in front of the sun or, rather, open them in a dark room." Sela photographs the touch of light on skin, paying attention to the elements of geometry, allusion, romance, fragility, aesthetics, humanity, and more. If you meet Sela, please point to one of his photographs and ask him "What is this?"