INTRODUCTION
Michael Flomen’s work dissolves the boundary between artist and environment. Working entirely without a camera, he uses light-sensitive film and paper to capture direct interactions with natural elements — firefly trails, water flow, snow patterns, sediment, wind. These large-scale photograms are less images than recordings: quiet transmissions from unseen realms, made visible through light and elemental presence. His process is patient, reverent, and attuned to phenomena beyond our ordinary perception.
COLLECTION
Abyss, 2019 - 56 x 58
Fire In The Sky, 2020 - 44.5 x 68
Crunchtime - 48 x 96
LAST ELEPHANT, AERIAL VIEW - 40.5 x 49.5
A Practice Rooted in Light, Stillness, and Discovery
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Montreal in 1952, Michael Flomen began making photographs in the late 1960s and has exhibited internationally since 1972. He first gained recognition for his early street photography, shaped by the formal rigor of Henri Cartier-Bresson. His first book, Details/M. Flomen, was published in 1980, followed by Still Life Draped Stone in 1985.
Flomen worked as a master darkroom printer and collaborator for other artists, including Jacques Henri Lartigue’s traveling exhibitions across Canada and the United States in the 1970s. In the early 1990s, he shifted to large-format photography with the Rising series, capturing the subtle formations of snow.
Over the last two decades, Flomen has developed a camera-less practice that invites the environment to co-create each work. Using light-sensitive materials exposed directly to firefly light, flowing water, or shifting sediment, his photograms are acts of attunement — quietly radical in their patience and elemental clarity.
His work is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Canada, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, LACMA, the Norton Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, among others.