Michael Somoroff

Michael Somoroff grew up in the midst of the Philadelphia and New York photography schools. His father, Ben Somoroff, was a student of art director Alexey Brodovitch at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art. In October 1979 the first exhibition of Somoroff’s photography was held at The International Center of Photography in New York City under the personal supervision of Cornell Capa launching Somoroff’s career. The show was reviewed in an article of the New York Times in October 1979.

Career

Somoroff had opened his photography studio in the mid-seventies, and started working for magazines such as Life, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, or Stern, in Europe and the US. He continued to develop his personal work, traveling throughout Europe, forming many friendships that served as the foundation for his artistic efforts. Among his most important mentors was the photographer Gyula Halász, better known as Brassai, Andreas Feininger, Louis Faurer, and André Kertész. He took their portraits as well as of many other master photographers he met early in his career, and published them thirty five years later in a book A Moment. Master Photographers: Portraits that was selected as Best Book of the Year by American Photo.

In 2006 Somoroff created a large-scale outdoor installation, Illumination I, for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. In an article] published in The New York Times about Illumination I in 2007, Elizabeth Bard describes his approach as “Madison Avenue meets the Italian Renaissance: big budgets, large teams, high-tech tools and an artist-manager equally at ease with corporate sponsors and Chelsea gallerists.” Absence of Subject, Somoroff's "unconventional homage" to legendary photographer August Sander, was presented during the 2011 Venice Biennale and has been traveling throughout Europe and South America since then (in Milan at the Fondazione Stelline, in Cork at the Sirius Arts Centre], in Luxembourg at the Villa Vauban, in Athens at the Benaki Museum, or in Montevideo at the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales.

Somoroff's work is represented in the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; and Museo Correr, Venice; it has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2016, Somoroff created in partnership with the creative studio Imaginary Forces a new production company Somoroff/IF based in New York and Los Angeles. Somoroff lives and works in New York.