Michael Marcelle

I have an interesting relationship to Mike Marcelle’s work. On the one hand, I totally get it, but on the other, i so don’t relate to where it comes from. I get the seeing, I feel the strength of the pictures, but his reference points feel so different than mine in a way. Like, for example, the new Suspiria would probably NOT come up in every conversation of mine, and with him, welll….. 

Process though - that’s another story. Hearing Mike speak about his way of making pictures, often involving ideas as starting points for photos i totally get. In his case, he jots them down in a several year long email to himself that he replies to over and over. Those ideas, though, are just to get off the couch, to try something out, to roam around and find things. The photos that he makes are always completely different and unexpected. 

Mike grew up in New Jersey where he recently made photos of his family which ended up in his book Kokomo, published with Matte in 2018. In Gregory Crewdson’s essay in the book, he says that Marcelle's photographs employ various conventions of the beloved horror and B-movies of his youth - self-consciously low-end special effects and garish, technicolor lighting - the materials of the domestic and familial are reconfigured into an uncanny, alien world. 

We conducted this interview remotely, i in Montreal, and Mike at his home in upstate New York that he shares with his husband Danny.

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