Photographie, 2023
Michael Flomen’s photography is focused on nature and our earth, combining natural elements outside under the cover of darkness. To create his photographs, he exposes photographic film and paper to the natural elements. His works emphasize the unseen aspects of our world, evoking memories and the forces of nature. Bucket List Number 5 is the fifth image produced in his Bucket List series of photograms made on film. Flomen exposed a sheet of 8 × 10 inch film to the bioluminescent light of a firefly in a bucket of collected rainwater. The negative was printed on gelatin silver photographic paper, selenium toned, and editioned to five.
Michael Flomen began making photographs in the late 1960s and has been showing his work on several continents since 1972. He served as a darkroom printer and collaborator for many artists and for the Jacques Henri Lartigue travelling exhibition that toured Canada and the United States in the mid-1970s. For the last twenty-five years, Flomen, a selftaught artist, has been using cameraless techniques to work directly in nature. Natural elements, including water, the light emitted by fireflies, wind, and other natural phenomena, are the inspiration for his picture making. Flomen’s work is represented in thirty collections, including the George Eastman Museum (Rochester), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach), the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York). Michael Flomen: Photograms and Photographs 2020–1970 was published by Hirmer in 2023.