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Christopher Michel

@chris_michel

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Photographing remarkable people and remote corners of the planet.
Artist in Residence, National Academies.

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This photo was an accident.

I was nearing 70,000 feet in a U 2, fumbling with the settings on a GoPro I had mounted in the cockpit. Somewhere in the mounting process, the shutter was pressed.

I’m glad I did.

At that altitude, the atmosphere is mostly below you. The sky overhead has gone nearly black. You’re sealed inside a full pressure suit because the world just beyond the glass can no longer support human life.

Before the flight, I’d gone through altitude chamber training, physical tests, hours of oxygen prebreathing, and an introduction to eating through a tube in a pressure suit. Chocolate pudding, as it turns out, works surprisingly well.

The U 2 was designed in the 1950s and is still flying. Long wings, tiny margin for error, built to spend hours in a part of the atmosphere few people ever see.

There are photographs you plan carefully.

And then there are the accidental ones that somehow bring you right back. A bit more on the story: A bit more on the photo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2015/05/28/on-the-edge-of-space-a-photographers-out-of-this-world-selfie-70000-feet-above-the-earth/ by @chris_michel

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a month ago

From the cockpit of a U 2 at 70,000 feet, the curve of the Earth stops being an abstraction. The sky above goes black. The horizon bends away beneath you. And for a little while, you are flying where almost nothing else does. by @chris_michel

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a month ago

Some places just feel different. The air has another quality to it. The light seems to come from somewhere else. You feel a strange pull in your body, something you can’t quite explain or even name. taken in Lofoten Islands, Norway by @chris_michel

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a month ago

Have spacesuit, will travel. U-2. by @chris_michel

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a month ago

Every now and then, light becomes the architect. @illuminatethearts by @chris_michel

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3 months ago

Hot Havana afternoons seem to stretch forever. by @chris_michel

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12 days ago

“The map is not the territory” - Alfred Korzybski. The real world is always stranger, rougher, and more alive than the diagram.

Franz Josef Land, Russian High Arctic. by @chris_michel

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8 months ago

Somewhere beyond the familiar, the world loses its edges. Union Glacier, Antarctica. by @chris_michel

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25 days ago

Burning Man is happening again this week, and I’ve been going back through photographs I made on the playa years ago.

The light is brutal. Dust gets into everything. People appear out of nowhere looking as if they’ve wandered in from another century, another planet, or somebody else’s dream. Enormous things are built with staggering effort, inhabited for a few days, then disappear.

That impermanence is part of what I loved about it.

You know it won’t last. The city won’t last. The art won’t last. Even the footprints will be gone.

But for a few days, tens of thousands of people agree to make the improbable real.

These photographs are my record of that strange place.
https://www.christophermichel.com/Places-2025/Burning-Man-Best by @chris_michel

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2 months ago

How far will you go for the photograph?

Apparently, all the way up.

#GoldenGateBridge by @chris_michel

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a month ago

The strange thing is how thin it feels from up there. A ribbon of roadway, a few lanes of traffic, cold green water on both sides, and nothing between you and the scale of it all but steel, fog, and a long way down. by @chris_michel

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a month ago

Magical Sea Ranch. @sony RX1R III by @chris_michel

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9 days ago