Michael King's new book is called Flight from Abstraction. He is also a physicist and a photographer, and he lives in Massachusetts.
Q: What inspired you to create Flight from Abstraction?
A: This work began as an assignment in an Atelier Class at the Griffin Museum of Photography. We were asked to choose an artist to communicate with and learn from.
I chose Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935), whose seminal work, The Black Square, launched the abstract art movement, in which representational forms from the natural world, such as birds, were deliberately obscured.
I imagined how each painting’s visual language might change if the “birds” could reappear in their original form. I began by combining some of my bird photos with Malevich’s abstract paintings, showing the birds breaking free from the surrounding forms.
I was pleased by my classmates' positive emotional reactions. Their feedback showed the concept had potential beyond the single assignment.
Over the next four years, this idea matured. I explored using more paintings from the abstract art movement, which required me to select more birds from my portfolio of bird images. Eventually, the project led to the book you see today.
Q: How did you create the images in the book?
A: I created the images using an old technique called photomontage. The process is like collage, except that the final images are composed of multiple photographs. For this book, I combined the images digitally with an Apple Pencil on an iPad.
Q: How did you decide on the works of art to include?
A: For years, I have enjoyed photographing birds. Today, my bird photographs number in the thousands. After reviewing these images, I searched the website Wikimedia Commons for high-resolution images of abstract paintings with visual elements that might accommodate the emergence of a bird.
In some cases, the matching of a bird with a painting was instantaneous. Other times it might take me weeks to find a good match.
An overriding consideration was the copyright status of each painting’s photo. All the images in Wikimedia Commons are in the public domain. I soon discovered that the term public domain can have many meanings. Once I committed to making a book, I limited the painting photos to older works with clearly defined copyright status in the US and the foreign countries where the book might sell.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope readers come away with a renewed desire to look closely. One of my great pleasures is watching someone spend time exploring one of these images—following the bird through the painting and noticing details in both the artwork and the creature that might otherwise go unnoticed. If the book offers people a new experience of visual discovery, I’ll be delighted.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now, I'm working on a project I call On Music. Here, I use photomontage to bring together two forms of expression close to my heart: photography and classical music. In this project, I am searching for ways to bring music I enjoy into a visual realm.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Samples of my photography are available on my website: https://mikekingphotos.com. Here you can find a selection of images from my book, along with listings of events and links to upcoming reviews and interviews.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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