Christian Michael Filardo

I love the world Christian Michael Filardo describes in their photos. It’s saturated, surreal, and questioning. Take Christian’s view of winter trees against a sunset sky - In Christian’s hands, a sunset is not color enough - so branches get splashed with red light transforming a dark silhouetted latticework of branches into a vivid vascular system that almost seems to beat with the universe's pulse.

Why do tree branches look like veins? What is that universal pulse that acts on all living beings? Why is it that we exist at all? Why is there something, not nothing? Why do we build things like dollar stores when death is just around the corner or heroicize our humanity when the reality is most of us are just trying to get through life with a big gulp from the 7-11 down the street?

*Untitled*, 35mm Color Film © Christian Michael Filardo

Our natural world and our human-made worlds are both such deeply strange and beautiful places, and yet most of us take it all for granted most of the time. I’m glad Christian’s photos remind us to live in the mystery and not the mundane.

I asked Christian to tell me more about their journey and practice in photography:

I first started making photographs in Sedona, Arizona while in high school. We were lucky enough to have a black and white darkroom there. Note, this was a while ago. I’m 30 years old now. Though it wasn’t until I moved to Baltimore, Maryland after college in Phoenix, Arizona that I began to make photographs more “seriously”.

While at Arizona State University I studied under Michael Lundgren who was a major influence on my photographic style and laid the foundation for how I sequence photographs today. However, I pursued a degree in intermedia art with a focus in performance while in school.

When I moved to Baltimore after university I had no studio, no money, no car. I was desperate for work and doing the classic door-to-door, application overload that one does when they move to a new city. I felt as though I had lost my art practice so I pivoted. I started carrying a Nikon Coolpix A, around and making digital images. It became compulsive. Everywhere I walked the camera came with. It became a salvation for my art making. I suppose for the camera nerds I switched back to shooting primarily 35mm film color film when I moved from Baltimore to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2015. That is also to say, camera, film, lens, none of it matters. The best camera is the one that you use to make images.

For me photography has always been about using the camera to critique modernity and place focus on the esoteric in hopes of forming a new photographic language and visual universe. Since I walk everywhere I am constantly in a state of flux, the otherwise banal and mundane become an ecosystem, something that changes and can be used to make gestures toward artistic and political ideas. Ideally, these images become a line in some sort of visual poetry. Though, there is a lot of garbage to sift through. It’s seemingly endless, the archive, ever growing. Ultimately, I hope to use photography as a tool to comment on art history, science, capitalism, global warming, human functionality, spirituality, and the surreality of being.

That being said, I think photographers need to think less about picture making and look at more painting, read more poetry, watch more films. Photography is so young, its history so short, if it’s to ever be truly accepted into the fine art world it needs to acknowledge the history of it more. Perhaps that sounds ignorant or arrogant, maybe both. Though, I am talking on a micro level. If the general photographer spent less time talking about gear and more time talking about art we would have a lot more images that function beyond the photographic conversation. Gosh, whenever I do these I feel so serious like I come off too intense. I assure you I am a fun person to be around.

I usually don’t love to talk about it but people always want to know, why flash? Why vertical? Flash, first and foremost is the ability to add an additional light source ad infinitum to any image you’re making. It can be useful for placing an emphasis on the foreground background relationship. To me, it’s useful for dividing a composition, for drawing attention to subject matter, for adding an odd visual component to a potentially otherwise drab scene. My images are primarily viewed on cell phones, that’s our reality, the screens are vertical. It’s how most of us see the world, so I record the world as such, vertically.

Outside of photography I write poetry and have somehow managed to scrape by a living in New York City for the past five months on my practice alone. It’s not always fun but I am free, I find happiness, I push away monetary woes by throwing I-CHING, going on walks, talking to my peers, and reading tarot. It’s all about keeping the vibe up I guess. If it wasn’t for photography and writing I wouldn’t be free to make art, to approach life as though everything has the potential to be art, to be lost, to be a fool. I am blessed.

My advice for anyone getting into photography as either an art form, hobby, or work is to always carry a camera and be absolutely relentless on the shutter. Waste film, waste memory card space, not everything will be good. You will lose money, you will lose time, it’s all an investment in your archive. If you do something long enough you will have a breakthrough, even if it’s just for you and you alone. Not everyone needs to see your images, life really is a divine joke after all. Nothing is precious, time passes us all, enjoy it baby.

My show “The Backyard of Heaven” is up atNightclub in Minneapolis, Minnesota until May 8, 2022. My most recent zine “The Purple Pill” is nearly sold out on Pomegranate Press should it be of interest to anyone.

Christian Michael Filardo is a Filipino American visual artist, composer, musician, poet, and sculptor currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Filardo writes critically for PHROOM and photo-eye and is a co-founder of the Richmond-based art space Cherry. Filardo released their first monograph, "Gerontion", with Dianne Weinthal at the Los Angeles Art Book Fair in April 2019. Since then, they have released numerous books and zines across multiple publishers, including Pomegranate Press, Udli Editions, and Phinery.

More of Christian’s work can be viewed on their website or their Instagram.

The photo of Christian at the top of the post is by Willa Piro.

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