Interview with photographer Michael M. Koehler

Michael M. Koehler is a working freelance photographer living in New York by way of Philadelphia. His stark, documentary style has a way of capturing intensely personal moments that are both visually arresting and yet entirely honest. In addition to four solo shows and numerous group shows, his work has graced the pages of the Philadelphia Tribune and has appeared in AND 1 Footwear ad campaigns. His current project, "Am Coming Home," is a nuanced portrait of life for several New Orleans communities as they rebuild in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Atif and I caught up with Mike at his East Village apartment hours before his flight down to Florida. We sat in his garden in the waning moments of a cool April evening, where Mike smoked some stiff tobacco while we discussed his work, film versus digital, and the merits of doing drywall.


So, let's start at the beginning, how'd you get into photography?
I started taking pictures and developing them myself when I was in 9th grade, so I was 13 or 14.. On the second day of class, Pete Capano, my high school teacher, showed me a slideshow of his body of work that was all his friends from when they were probably sixteen in the schoolyards, some of them with kids, some of them died and ODed, a lot of them heroin addicts. You could tell he was really one of the characters in them. He was less of a photographer running in and out of stories than just documenting his own life. My whole love affair with it was it was a great way to explore things, a way to travel with an idea.

You almost played football over studying photography, do you ever regret making that choice?
What I love about the two and why I'm so happy for being here is that whole way of living where you're training and performing. I think that's why I liked sports so much; you were out there, you're not thinking, you're just conditioned using what you had. Photography is very similar. You have these moments of reflecting, looking through images, that's your training, learning what you do better, and you're back out there, so you're always forced with, 'how did you perform?'


You hold all that so close to your self, it's interesting that you don't shoot sports more.
I'm kind of getting there, following a middleweight boxer, Peter "Kid Chocolate" Quillien, 18 and 0, fought at The Garden last month as an underscore. He's originally from Grand Rapids, Michigan, living in Brooklyn. The work has come back and looks really good so I've been really interested in it. I'm with the guy while he works out, so I watch a guy work for two hours, and I don't think I work that hard all week. But I feel like if I'm not in shape, or if I don't feel good goin into the gym, it's hard for me relate with him. I'm not gonna be the fat photographer weezing [laughs] trying to photograph the fuckin boxer.

A lot of your other work has to do with your personal travels. How do you think that different places and regional differences influence you and your work?
I think there's two real solid elements: there's people, and there's landscape. When you're away from the type of people and the type of landscape that you grew up on, two things happen. You either recognize something that reminds you of your childhood or where you came from, or it's something brand new, and you want to capture that because now you're experiencing it.—that is becoming a part of you right then. Specifically with Philadelphia, they're very real people—it's a working class town. There's this blue-collar pain that everyone endures that is compassion, even if it's rough. With the landscape, we have the biggest inner-city park in the whole country, which is Fairmount Park, and it's like 10,000 acres or something like a 1,000 times bigger than central park, you gotta check on that [ed. note: Mike wasn't pulling numbers out of his ass, Central Park is 843 acres compared to Fairmount Park's 9,200 acres.]. So I grew up in this dichotomy of being in the City in the urban environment, and then in the deep woods. So that natural sensibility plays in my work a lot.


The bulk of your serious work is shot in film, as opposed to digital. Considering that developing film takes longer and is more expensive, as well as all the technological developments to digital cameras, why do you still shoot analog?
Still the prints that I see that are the best are from film, with both black and white and color. I have not seen a better a digital. Aesthetically, it's a 35mm silver gelatin print, there's nothing more priceless and more important. You gotta really believe in what you're making for this to work. Also, there's something for me in the process, I would rather work with natural things like silver and light than a computer. Big thing about my film camera is the way the Leica sounds. It makes a difference. I shoot a lot of frames, so really that click changes my whole attitude towards creating, and that matters.


I know this is a terrible question that photographers always get, but try to explain what you're trying to do with your work, both in terms of any larger meaning as well as your overall style aesthetically and photographically.
I think life becomes the myth that you live, and that's real to the work. That's the ill reminder that it's not going anywhere, that magic that you see and you live, it's there. If you look at my work, it's about noticing energy, when human and the landscape become kind of one somehow. On an actual photographic level, I got really excited when I took a picture of the kids in the fire hydrant. That was important for me because it was the first time I was photographing a person interacting with water. You can't explain how it feels to you when you splash your face with water, but I know. It's something that's just a human truth, but its very personal, very awakening.


Explain your current project going on in New Orleans, what are you seeing down there post-Katrina?
I feel that one thing you don't see enough in the work is people's faces and the characters that have gone through this story of losing their house and what that means to a human, and what that should mean to you as another human in a different place. What is home? What do you need to be yourself and be comfortable going through this life? Why do you come home to a place that your house isn't there anymore? A lot of people would talk about the things they would cook in their house—the first meal they would have when they had their house rebuilt! They knew it right off the top of their heads—beans, rice, some chicken. You could just see everyone together, and that's why you came back to the place that was destroyed.



So how do you balance taking photos with the obligation of helping these people out?
I feel that documenting what's going on now can be an act of help in the sense of spreading the message of rebuilding, getting money for projects to enhance that. It's very important to always be thinking about active art. I went down there because I wanna help, I wanna meet these people that are going through this. I wanna be inspired by them, and the way you do that is getting involved! That's the greatest reward that a project can give you. But the only way it can give me anything is if I give myself. That's kind of what I always knew, but it was always in-and-out. And then you realize you are the science behind your art, how you approach it and how you live with it.

So how do you live with it, how do you balance making art with making money, and living? You're a working freelance photographer, I'm sure that comes up in your life everyday.
You have to kind of always have to be ready, know your system and be able to live but also to document, to not have one keep the other down. I survive by just doing what has to be done. I know that's easier to be said but before, I was in Philly doing drywall! Doing construction, doing landscaping, running to the crib, throwing off overalls and dirt, and putting on a suit jacket to go shoot a $50 photo for the local paper. And it hits a point, you fuckin' do enough drywall, and it will make you a photographer!

You can check out more of Mike's work at http://www.michaelmkoehler.com