Michael Lozano: In the Gathers of Life’s Fabric

Michael Lozano: In the Gathers of Life’s Fabric

Michael Lozano is an unassuming photographer and a self-described paranoiac. His photographs are less concerned with fixing and stabilising than they are with making thoughts perceptible at street-level, he often does this via disjunct vectors of lines of sight. In conversation he has a rare and impressive talent for moving light-footedly amongst different disciplines, genres, and topics at a depth much deeper than surface; in a constructively disorienting way, there is nothing extraterritorial to Lozano’s thoughts on photography. We met in a crowded basement bar in Prague, over the bustle we spoke about his ongoing works.

Photograph: Prague, 2022 (2). Michael Lozano.

You moved to Prague from America five years ago, does being an immigrant—as someone liminal and contingent—change what you think is worth photographing?

Compared to my hometown of Pembroke Pines, Florida I find the everyday things here in Prague to be cinematic, like commuters in winter coats, waiting for trams in full backlight against the early morning sun, it’s all asking for a story to be imagined. I find it easy to daydream about what might be happening when I’m in a place I don’t belong. I have been taking photographs for 15 years, and I studied Photography at FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague) as part of their Classical and Documentary studios but I have only recently accepted calling myself a photographer. For me, taking photographs was practice for making films, I was just dialing in with the camera. In a way, I accidentally became a photographer.

I can see that cinematographic quality in a particular photograph on your instagram, it has no title but you labeled it as 11x14” Gelatin Silver Print toned in Selenium. It looks like an innocuous frame clipped from the middle of a noir film reel.

The title is just a statement of what the thing is, as an artifact. Hopefully it provokes some reflection on the idea of viewing the image in its intended format, an optically enlarged darkroom print. When I encounter things that look neo noir I see so much potential for a story but it’s one of those kinds of mysterious stories that can never be understood, it’s one that’s always out of reach which means I never really know what I am getting at when I start photographing, if you see what I mean? Despite all of the uncertainty, for this project I knew I would shoot in black and white and I knew I was going to print it optically so the grain would get enlarged and the silver of the paper would add surface texture to the image. So in this process of trying to get to some point of clarity I have actually reduced information by stripping colour away and obfuscating details by enlarging and enhancing: I am adding noise to the signal, so to speak.

Photograph: Prague, 2023 (2). Michael Lozano.

It sounds like there is an existential, maybe solipsistic, dimension to that way of working, not that you are concerned with the general human condition but specifically with your own condition of being human.

My Professor once said to me that I take photographs like I am the last man on earth. I used to be occupied with fatalistic feelings of death. Every flight I would catch I would say goodbye to my friends as if it would be the last time I’d see them. Since my dad’s passing, so much of my photography has been rooted in a kind of positive nihilism—but maybe this isn’t the right word and we could just say “existentialism”. I don’t believe that everything is meaningless, I am just overwhelmed by the perplexing nature of it all and I know I will never get to the answers I might want. So living here as an immigrant in Prague means that I can take those feelings of great uncertainty and express them as someone who doesn’t belong here in the first place. It means that I drift and I like to drift.

Is it accurate to describe you as a street photographer?

I think I am a street photographer but I have this aversion to what we think of as street photography now. At this moment, particularly online, there is a hyperfocus on the “aesthetic” of how it should look which leaves curiosity and discovery to take the backseat in what essentially becomes a superficial sort of photographic popularity contest. It is more about following the rules of what a street photograph should look like rather than exploring the potential of what can be found: you must have primary colours, you must have impenetrably deep black tones, there must be one man in a trenchcoat walking and his legs must be in a perfect a-frame shape, if these things do not happen then it is not a successful street photo, so we all end up making the same photos. But I think when it comes to street photography you have to be curious, and this curiosity isn’t necessarily to do with being knowledgeable, I was making interesting images when I didn’t know much. I didn’t know that technically I was working wrong but I had a desire and a curiosity and a stubbornness to say I am going to drop out of college and live in Denmark for 4 months and I am just going to take pictures with a little point-and-shoot. I was 19 years old, I took some great pictures. Really, I want to be a documentary photographer, but I don’t get assignments, I don’t go out and shoot the war. Sometimes I think I am doing something more like lyrical documentary photography. But I don’t photograph in genres. There is a big difference between a photograph of a soldier eating Pho outside a Vietnamese restaurant and most of my other work, for instance. Genre for me is not context, it is a way of organising photographic potential.

Photograph: Prague, 2021 (2). Michael Lozano.

Photograph: Prague Selfportrait, 2021. Michael Lozano.

Without assignments, an audience, or a specific “message” are you working more intuitively in this lyrical style?

Photography is something that will always be very uncertain so you must develop a skill for being able to figure out what parts of that uncertain thing you are sensitive to, which might also mean an understanding of what it is that you are looking for. Weirdly when I play guitar there are certain sonic, harmonic, rhythmic things that scratch the same itch as that photograph might, in the same way there are certain cadences in films that can do it too. To be able to know what it is, perhaps only intuitively, means that you can recognise it when it happens. There is a part of me that wants to be more impulsive, but generally I do think that I work intuitively: I see it, I recognise it, I don’t understand it yet, and I hope I will do later when I investigate it on the contact sheets, so I snap the evidence now.

Michael mimes a mechanical action of winding on film and twisting a lens into focus at chest height, he raises the camera-sized empty space between his fingers to eye-level and takes his shot. It looks like he has done this many times before.

I might return to that photograph many years later. I really hope I am not going to be one of those photographers that dies with 10,000 rolls of undeveloped film in his basement.

You have recently refurbished a darkroom in the National Gallery Prague, how did you come to have this space?

It was a darkroom out of use for close to a decade. It was being used as a storageroom, I was offered the space if I cleaned, refurbished, and restored it, which I did over the spring and summer of 2025 with the help of a few colleagues at the gallery.

When you are working in this cinematographic context how does that relate to the purported “truthfulness” of documentary photography?

When we make stories that have illusive and enigmatic narratives we are also making real, factual artefacts out of them—the projected image, the negative reel, the developed photo, the enlarged print—so what are the facts? This is the space of uncertainty I like. Yes it is a real photograph made on film though an analogue process, it was hand printed, never a pixel in sight, it’s as real as it gets but ultimately it is just one of many other alternative versions of “the Truth”. How are we supposed to examine and study something in an objective way when we know just by looking at it that we are changing it? The theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg called this the “uncertainty principle”. Ultimately, I can’t claim to be getting at anything truthful because when I point my lens at something I am changing it. Knowing this has come to influence my relationship with the purported “truthfulness” of documentary photography.

Photograph: Warsaw, 2021. Michael Lozano.

Does this alertness to the uncertainty of “artefacts” as constructions, as ways of making sense, relate to how you see yourself as a paranoiac?

I am paranoid but in a specific kind of way, I don’t think I am being puppeteered but there are moments when I wonder what has become of my life and why I am documenting it within these certain aesthetic parameters. I am concerned with the orders and structures beyond what’s visible, these are the unanswerable questions, particularly for a photographer. For the novelist Thomas Pynchon, being paranoid means being able to make a connection between any two points, which means that anti-paranoia is the inability to to find connections. I’d say Pynchon unlocks things for my photographic thinking, I’ll read you some.

Michael opens a folder in his phone filled with photographs he has taken of pages from Pynchon’s works, he selects one from V, Pynchon’s first novel. I’m suspicious he even needs the source text to repeat the author’s words.

“Perhaps history this century, thought Eigenvalue, is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated, as Stencil seemed to be, at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which had come to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroy any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30's, the curious fashions of the '20's, the particular moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.”

Photograph: Teplice nad Metují, 2022. Michael Lozano.

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Michael Lozano is a Prague-based photographer, printmaker, and educator. He holds a BcA in Photography from The Academy of Performing Arts, Prague, and an AA in Visual Arts from Broward College. His work has been exhibited internationally at OFF Bratislava, Montreal Street Photography Festival, and PALM Photo Gallery in Miami, USA. He has been awarded prizes from The National Institute for Culture (Národní Institut pro Kulturu) and FCSPA (Florida Colleges Scholastic Press Association). michael-lozano.com