At the age of 17, Michael Sela (born 1998) Equipped with a Pentax film camera his father gave him, he embarks on a journey for the sole purpose of photography. This journey also takes place in Japan (2019), which becomes his home. 

Sela's photographs express sentimental and magical emotions at the same time. His photographs are a means of connecting with a different, distant Japanese reality, but which are also very intimate. He knows most of the people he photographs, and for him photography is capturing small moments in their midst. The people closest to him are photographed in a given space, because a photograph is a sliver of space as it is a sliver of time. In the words of Susan Sontag, from her book On Photography, "All photographs are memento-mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt."

In Sela's words, he turns emotion/time into something tangible that he can see and experience over and over again at will, much like music preserved on a record. For Sela, his persistence in using a film camera in a digital age is a choice without knowing its outcome. Every click is meaningful - a finger press from which there is no way back. The black and white photography is an expression of timelessness. "I don't want them to know when the photo was taken - a year ago, or fifty years ago," says Sela. Besides the presence of people, the element of light stands out in his work.  Text by Dr. Etty Glass Gisis, Chief Curator at the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art

Recent Exhibitions

Light on Skin (solo) — Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, Haifa, Israel, June–Nov 2024

Group Exhibition — Boomer Gallery, London, UK, March 2025

Light on Skin (solo) — Japanese Embassy, Tel Aviv, July 2025

2024, Naka-Sendou, Japan