Michael Julius’s peculiar vision hails from a life of contrasts. After studying anthropology and photojournalism in college, he spent some time in Israel on a kibbutz, some time in Seattle and New York pursuing photography, and then for a decade he settled in the rural American South where he photographed the community he serviced as a 911 Rescue paramedic. He met his wife on flickr.com and they soon jettisoned across Asia taking up residence in China, Taiwan, and Vietnam. They bicycled across Southeast Asia and in the erstwhile, he became a teacher. He now lives in Tucson, Arizona with his wife and son, and has since returned to his career in healthcare. Today we share his series The Road Divides Here.
The Road Divides Here
“My wife and I arrived in Beijing in 2009 with the hope to travel on the weekends, but it turned out that we ended up working “Chinese hours.” And, in general, we too often gave in to the heaviness of pollution and the crush of urban humanity. Underneath these yellow skies, despite myself, I found all around me this sort of melancholy that made me laugh.
The title, “The Road Divides Here,” is taken from a dry erase board in a surgeon’s office; the remnants of an English lesson, not my English lesson. Those are watermelons. You are a chicken. When the context of what you are seeing is missing, for lack of understanding the situation around you, or the greater culture or language you’re living in, you can allow the everyday to become strange and delightful, and isn’t that the mystical nature of photography, too?”
To view more of Michael’s work, please visit his website.