Michael Ernest Sweet : Educator, Writer, Street Photographer

He comes at you with a refreshing frankness, an eagerness to push at boundaries, happy to put his shoulder to street photography borderlands, and shove. Determinedly forthright and honest, photographer Michael Sweet is also an award-winning educator and writer, with gigs at Huffington Post, Photo Life (Canada’s biggest photography magazine), and here at   Street Photography. Oh yes, and he does like to be different

“I like to know what has come before me and what others are up to around me,” He tells me openly. “But I have never been the type of artist who strives to copy trends. In my opinion, street photography suffers from this affliction to a great extent. As a photography writer and contest judge, I regularly see work that is a blatant copy of someone else – sometimes a copy of my own work! We have to understand and follow the conversation, yes, but we must also make our own contributions to the discussion too. Be different. We have enough of same.”

©Michael Ernest Sweet

It is a good point, an inability to find your own ‘voice’ in street photography will leave you in the desert without water? So, why does this happen? Too many street photographers religiously following rules to the nth degree and who, inevitably, get lost among the incessant babble of social media outlets? Sweet immediately checks me, he doesn’t agree with my suggestion of ‘rules’, but instead thinks it is more about people copying each other.

“Listen, I’m going to be very frank here,” The Canadian-born, New York-based photographer warns. “The vast majority of street photographers have no clue what they are doing from an aesthetic, artistic, or photographic point of view. These are simply ‘guys with cameras’. They aim and shoot and try to sell it as art. Is this a problem? No, not necessarily. But…it explains why I see thousands and thousands of images of kids jumping into water, people jumping puddles, people walking in the mist with umbrellas, or people obscured by afternoon shadows (a favourite one-trick pony of colour street photographers).”

He might be frank and open and ‘brash’, as he himself admits, nevertheless, his thoughts and insight into the art are in great demand. He will, for example, appear in a 2018 film about American street photographer Gary Winogrand titled : ‘All Things Are Photographable’.

©Michael Ernest Sweet

Meanwhile, his photographs remain somewhat enigmatic and intriguing. I always wondered, for example, if the ‘We Are Human Motif’ on the skateboard was a subliminal message from Michael? In typical Sweet fashion he neither confirmed or denied.

“I often do not see my whole frame in its totality when I am shooting,” He explained the way he likes to operate. “ Rather, I aim to capture some little thing and then, later, in the editing process, I look at my photographs and “discover” other elements that were recorded. I look to find the gems. I work less in this haphazard way these days, but in that time (when he shot the kid with the skateboard), I really did work this way quite faithfully. It was not quite the “machine gun” style of Winogrand… as I always saw “something” that I wanted to capture, but it was certainly a long way from Henri Cartier Bresson’s patient approach also.”

There is, I feel, a strong sense of identity in Michael Sweet’s photography and writings. A sense of who he is, and what he is about. But, I also feel that his face-to-the-world covers some real vulnerability as well.

“Oh, yes, there was a lot missing, and likely still is,” He gently admits. “Indeed, one of the reasons I returned to the camera after a lengthy break in graduate school, was the need to find myself. I turned to art for therapy. My father had just committed suicide and a few other relationships in my life had ended in various ways, death, breakups, long-distance moves. I was in crisis…I needed an escape and looking at the world through a viewfinder worked well. One of the reasons I don’t feel compelled (or even interested) in photographing much these days is, I think, because I am in such a better place in my life. I think it is hard to make good art when you are happy.”

Michael’s current contentedness is, perhaps, street photography’s loss. Maybe his present reluctance to photograph might not last, there is always the pull of the street or indeed the beach, and we are soon talking about one of my own favourite shots from his Coney Island book.

©Michael Ernest Sweet

“People often enjoy this image even more for the story behind it,” He reveals. “It was taken at Coney Island, on the beach, and I had walked up to this old man to take the shot when he suddenly opened his eyes. He had been lying in the sun with his eyes closed. So, here he is with his eyes open and I am hovering over him – mere inches away from his face – with a camera. I quickly asked him a question, I think it was something like, where’s the nearest restroom, and he stretched out like you see in the image to point the way to the restroom. I fired the camera. In the end, the photograph was even more dynamic than if I had managed to capture my original shot. I think he knew what I was doing, but, like so many at Coney Island, he just didn’t give a ….”

In another series of shots, The Human Fragment – the idea for the title came from an email exchange Michael had with Joel Meyerowitz – Michael’s willingness to alter our realities, to take shots awkwardly askew and to push at doors is evident.

©Michael Ernest Sweet

In Human Fragment, Michael uses interesting camera angles, which then leads to cutting aspects of a person’s anatomy, so we only see the lower half of a face, or a suit jacket, rather than the whole person in a suit. Legs, arms, and heads are often missing, and photographs are taken slightly off kilter. One of the interesting things, for me, about the check suit jacket shot is the lady on her phone in the background.

What I find so intriguing about his photographic work, however, is this relentless feeling of restlessness, and edginess.

“I think a lot of my photography embodies a kind of restless anxiety – an edginess,” He agrees. “This comes from a couple of different places. Some of it is captured, as it were, from my environment. Montreal and New York City are busy places with lots of restlessness and anxiety. The people themselves, the subjects of my photographs, are edgy. So, it makes sense that this would read in the photographs, at least to me. Additionally, and perhaps amplifying this effect, is the fact that I am an anxious person…it’s part of my personality, it transfers into how I see and how I operate the camera. I am very haphazard in my approach. I am not someone who carefully thinks over my camera settings or my compositions – I react to what I see and I do it with rapid judgement and speed. This intensity brings some visual immediacy to my work. I think that is what people read as “edginess”.

©Michael Ernest Sweet

His latest work is a series of photographs, that are at once eerily disturbing and challenging.

“My newest work is a year old,” He tells me candidly. “I’ve not been actively photographing since the fall of 2017. Photographs such as ‘Baby in a Basket’ and ‘Woman with a Handbag’ are from this recent work. They were made using the Japanese cult-classic toy camera called a Harinezumi. It’s a lo-fi camera with a 3 MP sensor. There are no adjustments and you cannot do any post-production work – what you get is what you get. Using a Harinezumi is like playing the lottery – lots of losses, but some big wins also. It was a fun project because I aimed to eliminate as much visual information as possible from the images without quite entering pure abstraction. I didn’t think too much about the work or ‘why’ or ‘how’ I was making it – I just experimented. In the end, I ended up with a fairly substantial body of coherent work. It’s for sale, by the way, should anyone be interested.”

©Michael Ernest Sweet

Talented, controversial, in his own words ‘brash’, Michael Sweet is that rare commodity in art : someone who will never play things safe for the sake of it. He will always tell it how it is, and happily reveal uncomfortable truths. But, we need pioneers to lead us into new eras, those who are not afraid to try new things, those who are not afraid of the critics, or speaking their mind. I think his sometime abrasiveness comes from the fact that he really does care about street photography. And, street photography, and indeed, photography, would be much poorer without people like Michael Sweet.