Michal Story

Today is Friday, August 7th

Hello everyone! Today we’re looking at the surreal urban photography of Michal Story. Michal started her artistic life with tapdancing when she was very young, then switched to ballet, and later began drawing. Once she found photography, Story underwent yet another reinvention of her artistic self. She writes that when she emerged from Santa Monica College, where she received extensive training in the photographic arts, and re-entered her world, she found herself especially drawn to buildings. “In an urban landscape,” she writes, “we tend to pay more attention to the people within it than to the buildings which they inhabit”. However, says Story, we have a lot more in common with our homes and office buildings than we may realize. “After all,” buildings, like us, are “conceived, built, lived in, and then one day, gone”. 

Story says that she feels a tug from certain buildings that call her to capture them as she sees them. She’ll then take a panorama of the building, or buildings, and deconstruct and reassemble the image in Photoshop. Through this method of rendering the more traditional photograph into a dreamlike digital collage, Story is able to recreate a very personal memory of the building and its impression on her, working as if she were putting together pieces of a puzzle. She is guided by her initial sense of the personality of the architecture, though as she works, the building itself often has other ideas for the finished product, and she will find herself with an entirely different landscape from the one she had imagined. She creates each depiction of her buildings the same way she began with them; by taking a picture and following a feeling.

You can see more of Michal Story’s work on her website,Michal Story Photography.