Michael Joseph is a street portrait and documentary photographer. Raised just outside of New York City, his inspirations are drawn from interactions with strangers on city streets, and he aims to afford his audience the same experience through his photographs. His portraits are made on the street, often unplanned and up close, allowing the viewer to explore the immediate and unseen. Themes throughout his portraiture and projects include identity formation, found family, wanderlust, the human journey, the search for equality, and human authenticity.
His first monograph, Lost and Found: A Portrait of American Wanderlust, was published by Kehrer Verlag in fall 2023 in Europe and spring 2024 in the United States.
Michael’s work has been featured on CNN, Vice, The Guardian, Dazed, AnotherMan, Paper Magazine, HUCK, and The Advocate, and published in magazines internationally, including Elle, Inked, 1814, and SHOTS. His work has been exhibited nationally, with solo shows at Daniel Cooney Fine Art (New York, NY), Soho Photo Gallery (New York, NY), and FP3 Gallery (Boston, MA). Group exhibitions include the notable Aperture Gallery (New York, NY), Getty Images Gallery (London, UK), and Griffin Museum of Photography (Massachusetts). He has lectured at the International Center of Photography (New York, NY) and Savannah College of Art and Design (Savannah, GA), as well as in portraiture classes at the New England School of Photography (Boston, MA), and has taught at the Light Factory (Charlotte, NC).
His portraits are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston, TX), Fort Wayne Museum of Art (Fort Wayne, IN), Rochester Museum of Fine Arts (Rochester, NH), the Jack Shear Collection at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (Saratoga Springs, NY), and private collections. He is a 2023 and 2016 Photolucida Top 50 Photographer, a 2020 Photolucida Finalist, and a LensCulture Portrait Award Finalist. He is a recipient of a fellowship in photography from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a residency at Twenty Summers (Provincetown, MA), and a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation.