Michael Axel

Axel has been photographing since age 7. His first camera was a square format Kodak Instamatic which formed a special bond to his seeing the world through a square format. By age 12 he built his first darkroom where he spent hours developing and printing black and white and color film. He perfected a technique of stand development which he used in nearly all of the tend of thousands of images he took. He bought a YashicaMat camera in high school so he could work with a larger film format, and loved taking images of anyone who would pose for him. A couple years later the Portland Art Museum selected an image of a homeless man for an exhibition. Shortly after the exhibit opened, he was offered a job working with Hasselblads camera, and his career was off and running. He has authored five books, and is known in the photography community for his book, "Iridescent Light, The Art of Stand Development." It was adopted as the go to guide for the development process he had perfected since childhood. Axel is also a painter, sculptor, poet and opera singer. He lives in Sisters, Oregon.

BA George Fox University, Newberg, Oregon