Michaela does simply amazing work, especially since she is (at this writing) doing it exclusively with a point-and-shoot Nikon P5000, a camera that doesn’t get a lot of respect. Her craftsmanship with the little pocket-sized camera is superb. Michaela seems to specialize in dark, forbidding, abandoned homes, castles, s… Read more

Michaela does simply amazing work, especially since she is (at this writing) doing it exclusively with a point-and-shoot Nikon P5000, a camera that doesn’t get a lot of respect. Her craftsmanship with the little pocket-sized camera is superb. Michaela seems to specialize in dark, forbidding, abandoned homes, castles, schlosses, factories, hospitals — all places where humans have lived, worked, sweated, loved, and possibly died. Her work is, therefore, intensely human, and deeply humanistic. Everything to which she turns her alert, discerning eye makes one feel what it might be like to be an archaeologist studying the ruins of a dead civilization: our own dead civilization! There is beauty and disfigurement, and joy, and sadness, and ghosts! WE are here, unseen, but the humanity is palpable. Michaela’s is strong stuff, with a signature darkness and loneliness and decay, yet we also sense, rather we know, from what was left behind by now departed souls, that once there was light and laughter in this place. I hope that her photographs long outlast her crumbling subject matter. They are truly frozen moments in rapidly passing time.