Artist Profile
Mike's Bio
Mike Friedman has been involved with photography, media and technology since his childhood. He started with a rotary post-card printer, setting rubber type to create scout and club announcements. Later, newspaper layout and poster printing roles developed his eye for composition. At fourteen, he put together microscope and camera parts to make an enlarger and designed an electronic "tuning fork" as his senior high project. He studied vision, did a deep dive into holography and had a career in computer graphics and image processing. While on stage crew at eleven, Mike found a passion for theatrical lighting which became a life-long avocation. A first-grade eye injury underlies Friedman's interest in vision and how we see. His academic, professional and artistic careers followed that path.
Around fifty years ago, Mike became disillusioned with his photos. They looked like work from thirty years earlier, he felt stagnated. Although his "eye" helped with day-to-day shots, something was missing. Mike had seen an experimental "video synthesizer" demonstrated at the Lake Placid Workshop. He was captivated by some of the effects, that machine had not been coloring within the lines.
A breakthrough came when thinking about early cameras and how people had to endure stillness and rigid head rests for portraits. Movements led to "ghosts" and "motion blur" in the images which ruined the plates. Mike took a celebrate-the-errors approach and decided to try creating blurred shots. Were there some visible traces of the movement, an underlying aesthetic structure? He locked the shutter open pinhole-style, put his camera on the dashboard and drove around town one night.
The resulting long-exposure photos had streaks of color with interesting characteristics and textures - dashed and solid, sharp and blurred, bright and dim - as if "painted with light." Some images were like impressionist works. Patterns morphed as they repeated across the images. Here was order and disorder - perfect compositional elements.
These efforts got a boost from Mike's long-time friendship with Robert Mallary - a mid-twentieth-century assemblage sculptor and early computer art pioneer. Bob encouraged his efforts and loaned him a stereoscopic camera to shoot a neon sculpture exhibition. The lamps left wide, distinctive traces and camera movements translated directly into three-dimensional shapes as if "sculpting with light." Both wound up exploring the medium further.
For many photos, darkroom tricks played critical roles in shaping the images. By the mid-1980s, digital photography was nudging out film, software provided more flexibility than the darkroom and desktop film scanners became available to capture the older work. Mike was writing image processing and graphics software, Mallary was teaching him how to use it.
Friedman's sense of aesthetics also matured through his work as a theatrical lighting designer. Over more than four decades, he concentrated on how color, contrast and dynamics reflected emotions in the productions. Photography took a back seat to the expressiveness he found in lighting.
Along the way, Mike's farm roots persisted. Where his parents had cider orchards and a commercial egg farm, Mike had a little garden and road-side produce stand. He later spent nine years raising Boer goats and was often on food coop boards. Apple trees always seem to appear where he lives.
Mike realized the North Country was "home" while a student at Clarkson then spent forty-two years hoping to return, which he did eight years ago. Over the past decade, he has been collaborating with printmaker/painter Deborah Geurtze producing gallery shows and hosting pop-up tent sales. During the Covid era, they created an outdoor gallery (Abstract-ADK) and featured artists' talks and weekly showings at their Saranac Lake home.
Current digital cameras are capable of producing high resolution, long-exposure shots and they are equipped with basic image editing software. Results appear immediately in the viewfinder, compositions can be more deliberate. Mike started shooting again and scanning old slides. Samples of his work can be viewed on this website or on LightInTimeAndMotion.com.