Michael Joseph is a street portrait photographer. Raised just outside of New York City, his inspirations are drawn from interactions with strangers on city streets and aims to afford his audience the same experience through his photographs. His portraits are made on the street, unplanned and up close to allow the viewer to explore the immediate and unseen.
Michael’s project “Lost and Found” has been featured on CNN, Vice, and many others. He has been exhibited nationally, notably at the Daniel Cooney Fine Art (New York City).He has lectured for Amy Arbus at the International Center of Photography (New York, NY) in portraiture classes at the New England School of Photography (Boston, MA) and taught at the Light Factory (Charlotte, NC). His portraits are held in the permanent collection at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana. He is also a 2016 Photolucida Top 50 winner, LensCulture Portrait Award Finalist and recipient of the fellowship in photography from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
About ‘Lost and Found’:
While most people settle for a road more commonly taken, a group of uncommon young adults travel around the United States by hopping on freight trains and hitching rides in cars. Reminiscent of children of the 1930’s Dust Bowl era blended with roots in the punk squatter subculture, these kids leave home to find a better life and sometimes work. They are often lost and driven by wanderlust, escapism and adventure. Some have no choice but to run away from an intolerable family situation while others leave supportive families to find the people they fit in with most. A Traveler takes to the open road and rail in search of something better and often in search of himself.
Like graffiti on the walls of the city streets they inhabit and the trains they ride, the bodies and faces of the Travelers become the visual storybooks of their lives. Travelers give each other tattoos by “stick and poke,” a method of using a pin or needle with India ink to inscribe a memory from their travels. Their clothing is often a mismatch of found items. Jackets and vests are self-made, sometimes using fabric pieces of a fellow Traveler’s clothing like a patchwork quilt.
A far cry from the hobo’s stick and handkerchief, their packs contain all their belongings. They carry cell phones, clothes for all degrees of weather, first-aid and health items, old travel radios, card games, mats to sleep on and other found items. But as one Traveler points out, “Americans are wasteful,” and Travelers make do with what others leave behind. To live one doesn’t really need that much. “I have nothing really, but I have everything at the same time,” a Traveler recounts. “Less is more and frees us.” Their concern is to find what they need to live each day rather than to worry about the future.
Life on the rail and road is freeing, but also hard and unsafe. Finding a place to sleep or “squat,” can lead to arrest even though it is on public property. Kids have been pulled under the rails and killed while catching a train “on the fly,” or moving. Jumping off a moving train also proves to be deadly when a pack gets in the way and pulls the traveler under. Infected wounds can lead to loss of limbs.
Drug use and addiction for many becomes an inescapable trap. Some avoid drugs and alcohol, but the adrenaline rush of exploring endless new terrain or jumping on the train itself, likened to riding a roller coaster by many, proves to be the real addiction. As one Traveler stated, “riding trains is my drug of choice.” Another stated, “It’s terrifying but exhilarating at the same time; it’s the best feeling in the world…like you are flying for a minute.”
Among all this risk lies the payoff. Some have traveled to all reachable 48 states and the backdrop of their lives could be anywhere at anytime. They have avoided a prescribed way of life that society has laid down for them. They are happier because society doesn’t dictate what they should do and what they should have. They have time to figure out who they are before the world tells them who they should be. They invest in new friendships, forged by helping each other survive. These friendships are intensely strong in ways that new adult friendships simply cannot be. Some decide to travel for a short period of time, while for others, this becomes the way for life.
Joseph’s portraits are not a documentation of Travelers’ lives, but rather a collective, close-up look at individual souls. As one Traveler points out, “Perhaps every story is not important because every story is really different. It’s the sense of connection and free lifestyle that binds us.” Attention is focused on the person, rather than the place because their environment could be anyplace at anytime. In some cases they have been photographed in different cities, at different periods of time and sometimes years apart. Despite their appearances, they are some of the kindest people one might meet.
They are not to be pitied nor romanticized by the viewer. Perhaps their faces invoke fear or perhaps envy. They are to be viewed and felt as the person who lies somewhere between. Their souls are open and their gift is time. As one states “They will give you their time because time is all they have.” And in most cases, in the family they have lost, they have found each other.
Courtesy of “Daniel Cooney Fine Art” for the images.
