Michael Powers

Massachusetts-based Large Format photographer, Michael Powers holds a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. In 2010 while traveling through the southwest Gers region of France, Powers began documenting life on the farm of UK natives, Stuart and Louisa Hallewell. Powers’ work emphasizes the rawness of sustainable living paralleled with childhood innocence. His work has been exhibited throughout New England and he is a contributing photographer to Boston based Photography Collective, “Camera Records In Time.”

Plantlife, 2010

Michael Powers’ images create a visual narrative of the Hallewell family. Leaving their comfortable life in England to travel to the South of France in search of ‘home’, they returned to their deteriorated family farmhouse. With the help of friendly neighbors and volunteers, life returns to the land and new harvests are created.

From Above, 2010

Stuart, 2011

Harmonie, 2011

Louisa, 2011

The photographs, though taken in the present, record the past. Relationships between images reveal multiplicities of history: the history of the land and the structures upon it, of the documented story and of the photographic medium itself. Through careful sequencing and pacing, the links between images advance a narrative while referencing the history of image-making.

Moving between portraits, still-lives and landscapes, cascading light functions as a unifying element. Tracing the blades of grass in a field and the curving neck of a slaughtered duck, the use of light borrows from the aesthetics of Dutch genre painting, chronicling the everyday. Just as William Henry Fox-Talbot drew this history in his images comrpising The Pencil of Nature, Powers make reference to the beginning of photography, creating equivalences between image-types. The resultant photographs expose the history of the land through the history of visual description.

Death, 2011