MichaelSomoroff

Michael Somoroff (born 1957, New York City) is an American communication strategist, multimedia artist, director, and photographer. The son of the noted still-life and product photographer Ben Somoroff — a student of the legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch at the Pennsylvania Museum of Industrial Art — Somoroff grew up in his father's studio on East 54th Street in Manhattan, a hub for the art directors, photographers, and designers who shaped mid-century American editorial and advertising imagery. He studied art and photography at the New School for Social Research in New York.

In the late 1970s Somoroff moved to Europe, eventually establishing a photography studio in Hamburg, where he became a sought-after editorial photographer, contributing to Life, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Stern, Time, and Der Spiegel. His practice evolved toward conceptual, multi-layered work that reinvents philosophical, religious, and psychological themes through movement, time, and light, frequently employing digital technology as part of the construction of each image.

Among his best-known projects is Illumination I, a large-scale outdoor installation created for the Rothko Chapel in Houston in 2006, and Absence of Subject, an homage to August Sander exhibited on the Piazza San Marco during the 2011 Venice Biennale — making him the first artist to exhibit directly on the square. He has also published five books, including A Moment: Master Photographers, Portraits by Michael Somoroff (Damiani, 2012), documenting his associations with photographers such as Louis Faurer, André Kertész, and Melvin Sokolsky.

Somoroff's work is held in major public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Museo Correr, Venice, and has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. He lives and works in New York City.