Michael Spano’s photographs look like nobody else’s. This is partly due to his use of photographic equipment and techniques not as they were originally intended. He has taken an eight-lensed camera meant to record the stages of a golf swing and modified it so that the shutter clicks every four seconds, creating multi-image photographs that capture the pulse of a hectic city. He has used solarization, once a studio technique favored by the Surrealists, to create powerful and moving street portraits. And he has taken a panoramic camera, designed to photograph grand vistas with a moving shutter, onto a crowded subway car, making a photograph that expresses simultaneously individual personality and the tumult inherent in this very urban mode of transportation. In all instances Spano reveals himself as a highly inventive picture-maker, capturing the constant, jittery notion of urban life while subverting and inverting the tradition of street photography.

A Bronx-born, Yale MFA graduate, Michael Spano is the former director and curator of the Midtown Y Photography Gallery in New York, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in the collections of many major museums, including MoMA, New York; Cleveland Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Israel Museum. He lives and works in Brooklyn.