Project statement:

For the last several years I've driven a 52-mile commute to my medical practice in a small city in central Kentucky. I depart my suburban home, travel a busy stretch of interstate highway to my job, and reverse the trip at day's end. I traverse a lush, sparsely populated semi-rural landscape, marked by the presence of people I mostly donʼt see. I view their homes and playgrounds; their businesses and industrial sites; their rural hamlets and suburban shopping malls. Isolated within my car, apart from these unseen people, I already feel I'm The Other.

I drive, thinking of the day to come, or the day gone by, steering autonomically while my mind sifts what my eyes feed it. The siren calls of color, light, geometry, and form beckon me to stop to shoot at once, or to return later. I respond superficially to the many lovely scenes I encounter; who doesn't love a "pretty" picture? But I also sense the incongruities and oddities, and the manicured faux-perfection that betrays the human impulse to impose order around oneself. However I approach, I photograph as an interloper in places where I rarely feel fully at home. This tension, between visual attraction and emotional discomfort, is why Iʼve returned time and again, camera on the seat beside me.

The vague anxiety this tension provokes prods me to shoot quickly, and return to the familiar confines of the car. But "quick" isn't so easy when wielding an eight-pound manual camera, or reloading finite rolls of film. Iʼve shot this work on medium-format color-negative film for its ability to render complex, multi-dimensional information on a large plane of whatever emulsion best suits the day's light. But the cameras' physical heft and cumbersome operation are also soothing impediments to the task at hand. I must stop, compose, focus, and shoot; and though I donʼt linger, neither can I easily heed the voice that screams, "you don't belong here," and hasten back to the comfort of the commuter's hermetically-sealed isolation.

Bio and contact:

Michael Sebastian was born in New Orleans, and grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Dallas, Texas. He started making and developing photographs around age eight (thanks, Mr. Treat) using the Kodak Brownie of renowned my-first-camera cliche. Once its brittle bakelite finally yielded to his ham-fisted ministrations, he graduated to a well-used Zeiss Ikon Contina with a broken light meter, which further disappointed him by failing to bounce resiliently from concrete.

Undismayed, Michael wound up graduating from medical school and two residencies, photographing all the while—with greater or lesser frequency—around life's other obligations. Along the way, he married a Kentuckian and moved to Louisville to raise two children. When not shooting, he practices anesthesiology in central Kentucky, in roughly that order of precedence. Fortunately for both cameras and patients, he now drops things far less frequently.

Michael Sebastian is a Louisville, KY, based photographer.
To view more of his work, please visit his website: michaelsebastian.com
You can also contact him by e-mail: info@michaelsebastian.com