Michael Young

The Camera's Community

STORY BY P.M. CAMPBELL

Published Dec 2022

Michael Young is the Adult Education Coordinator at the Bronx Documentary Center (BDC). As a freelance, street, and portrait photographer, he has done assignments for The New York Times, as well as for Jill Jones’s South Bronx Rising, which uses one of his photos as its cover. He was also a musical theater major, street dancer, and a finance worker. None of his experience or influence is independent however, as it all ties into the core of what makes him an artist. Similarly the support he has received throughout his journey, from counselors, friends, and family has been indispensable. Young, among eight other BDC artists, is the recipient of an Artist Employment Grant from Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY). As a creator who takes everything into account when making art, his past projects have shaped his present and his future projects will be informed by his past. 

Discussing his creative experiences, Young maintains that “music is the one thing that ties all of those different pieces together and kind of informs even what [he does] photographically”. Likewise, every human hand that has touched him has left an indelible print on his life. He is fifty-five years old, and has a well-documented childhood from his aunt who would caption her own photos. Discussing his meeting with a guidance counselor after twenty years working in finance, he said “based on the questions that she asked me and the answers that I gave. She was like you’re an artist”. She would not be the last person to recognize this, however. In 1995, the woman who would become his mother-in-law gave him one of his first cameras, and while he “loved what [he] was seeing compositionally… especially like the blur of background” he would get “so frustrated [he would] just put it down”. While he has lived in the Bronx for twenty-two years, he moved to Melrose in 2008. It was not until 2009 when the wife of one of Young’s late friends sold him her husband’s camera that he started to take photography seriously. By that point, he reflected “I started shooting and I haven’t stopped since”. In 2011, his wife told him about coming across the BDC on a walk, and when he walked over he met founder Michael Kamber. Young started to attend Friday night classes, and exhibitions, as well as occasionally volunteering. “It was nice just to be around other people...” he said “ I think one of my biggest memories is the camaraderie and the community, and kind of the encouragement that I got from the Friday night group”. 

In August 2022, he officially started working at the BDC as the Adult Education Coordinator. He describes it as coming full circle to a moment he has long prayed for: getting “to a place where photography could take care of my family”. Michael Young’s community extended far beyond his Friday night group; it included his wife, mother-in-law, Michael Kamber, and everyone who recognized him as an artist, going back to his guidance counselor.

Michael Young is one of 300 artists chosen for The Artist Employment Program (AEP) by CRNY, which allocated $49.9 million to fund creatives. He was recognized by the BDC for his work on the Claremont Project, documenting the five NYCHA housing projects that comprise what is known as Claremont Village, and subsequently selected for the AEP. As a fellow in the photographer’s cohort, he took pictures of a basketball camp as well as doing projects like his Generations and Corridors. “I always wondered what makes a person want to leave and what makes a person want to stay,” he said, discussing Generations  “So my project was to … do some oral histories or or portraits or a combination of the two to document people who had been in the projects [all their lives].” As someone who grew up in Brooklyn projects, hating the vertical proximity of living, yet loving the people, he continued: “I came back with more artistic eyes now. I was looking at the things that I hated. So I would take pictures of the building, but I would also take pictures of the textures and the walls and the broken glass. And I call that part of my project Corridors”.

Young has several ongoing and upcoming projects, personal and public. He has a long-term project documenting his ninety-year-old father-in-law, centering on the significance of becoming a caregiver for a parent. The Sum of Her Parts is a series of images following his wife, who is instrumental in his journey to being an artist. Sometimes I See Michael is an attempt to transgress the ways photographers interact with the houseless community and analyze the factors that lead to their position. 

“The street is the real runway to me,” he says, and as a product and producer of New York culture, Michael Young is the definition of a community photographer. His street photography excels because he was once dancing on the same sidewalks. He grew up in housing projects similar to the ones he photographed in the Claremont Project. The songs he once sang in a church circuit can still be heard in his photos of the people of New York. From the Bronx Documentary Center to Claremont Village and beyond, no matter where Michael Young goes, his camera is anchored in his community in New York.