Mikael Levin

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Mikael Levin is a contemporary photographer. He was born in New York City and raised in France, New York, and Israel. Mikael Levin's work often focuses on questions of identity and memory, place and time.

Recent works of his include Time Lapse Sequences, Christina's History, and Settling into Nature.

Time-lapse sequences uses sequences of identical photographs to study a given space during different times of day under different sunlight situations. The work is presented as a looped movie clip.

Cristina's History takes the multi generational migration story of a branch of his family (Poland to Portugal to Guinea-Bissau) as a metaphor the enduring hopes of modernity. It is about identity and Diaspora; abut how the modern day experience of displacement and migration can be taken as a basis for personal identity. It is also about our understanding of the notions of time and place.

In a more documentary style are two major projects War Story (1995) and Notes from the Periphery (2003). In War Story he retraced his father's journey as war correspondent during the close of the Second World War, photographing the places his father wrote about then as he found them 50 years later. The exhibition presents those photographs with excerpts of his father's writings. It was shown at the International Center of Photography in New York, and eight museums in Europe. A selection of photographs from War Story is included in the permanent installation of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Notes from the Periphery was shown at the Venice Biennial in 2003. It presents three series of photographs, from France, Senegal, and Trinidad, each relating to a different attribute of modernity. The underlying theme is an evocation of modernity's origins in the Triangular Trade.

Other works of Levin's include The Border Project (1993), which looks at the changing notions of borders in Europe, and Common Places (1996) about the manifestation of cultural identity in ordinary urban spaces of four typical European cities. His book Silent Passage is a study of an isolated lake in Sweden (Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1985). A more recent publication, Pleasant if Somewhat Rude Views, is an artist's book revolving around his photographs of a small farming village in France (One Star Press, Paris, 2005.)

Levin's work is included in many leading collections in the US and in Europe, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Pompidou Center and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, as well as the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Mikael Levin is the son of Meyer Levin and the grandson of Marek Szwarc.

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