This series is influenced by the Velasquez’ paintings in the Prado in Madrid. The men are found on the streets and in the nightclubs of the places I have lived: New York City, Paris, London, Liverpool, Antwerp, Atlanta. Each session is one hour and the photographs are all made in natural light.
“O'Brien, perhaps following Baudelaire's flâneur,
finds his subjects on the streets of New York, Paris, London, Antwerp.
As a collection, they are random but intentional.
Photographed against a uniform black background,
the men are shown bare-chested or wearing simple black shirts.
At once restrained and erotically charged, the rich inky
background imparts to their skin the pearly glow of a Caravaggio-
or, when compared to the men's stillness, the look of a Velazquez.
By changing a few extraneous details,
O'Brien demonstrates how the very act of looking was already fetishized.”
-Carla Ruth Dunham, artUS,
Author biography
Michael James O’Brien is a photographer, writer, educator, activist.
He has chronicled queer life from the drag culture and AIDS activism of 1980s New York to contemporary global communities.
He has the BA in English from Kenyon College and MFA in Photography from Yale, where he studied with Walker Evans.
From 1993–2003, he collaborated with Matthew Barney, producing still photography for Drawing Restraint 7 and The Cremaster Cycle, exhibited at the Guggenheim, Musée d’Art Moderne, and museums worldwide. His solo exhibitions include Galerie 213 (Paris), Hermès (New York), the Joyce Gallery (Beijing), and LOOK/ Liverpool Photography Festival.
Since 2016, O’Brien has served as Chair of Photography at SCAD, overseeing programs across all locations and online. He received a SCAD Presidential Fellowship for his Liverpool portraits (His Tender Heir, 2017) and a 2024 sabbatical to pursue Blue Boy, reinterpreting Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait (from 1770) as a contemporary symbol of gender nonconformity.
His work is held in the Victoria & Albert Museum, National Portrait Gallery (London), Cleveland Museum of Art, SCAD Museum of Art and other museums