BRIEF BIO - Michael P. Farrell Staff Photographer Albany Times Union/Artist

I was born in Buffalo, New York. In that beginning my social skills and later visual skills were formed at an early age. Though the oldest of my parents 3 boys, I came into the world to a packed extended family of five older uncles ages nine to seventeen, and my mother’s parents, all under a single roof.

My mother’s father, William McDonell, went blind in his 30's from complications from diabetes.  So from the time I could walk and reason I become his eyes as we would take walks, his hand on my shoulder, around the inner city blue collar neighborhood, called Black Rock, often playing games of visual description as I explained the sights to my grandfather.

I developed an interest in photography at 12 years old and by my mid-teens had decided this was what I would do for my life. I majored in advertising arts at a vocational technical high school having a retired Courier Express photographer, Lou Haristry, as my first influence. I graduated high school a year early then attended Buffalo State College for a year and studied with famed art photographer Les Krims. I transferred to Rochester Institute of Technology for my sophomore year and junior year getting an associate degree in Photographic Illustration. I completed my full time college study as an Art Education major at Buffalo State College and have some graduate school credits from the MFA program at Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester having studied photographic image sequencing with Nathan Lyons.

I consider myself a street photographer, my influences being photographers Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank, Martin Parr and Tony Ray Jones, painters Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollack and Amedeo Modigliani, other artists Ornette Coleman (jazz), Rickie Lee Jones (singer/song writer), Wim Weiders, Jim Jarmusch (directors), Richard Serra (sculpture), Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Walter Mosley, Janette Turner Hospital (authors), Humphrey Bogart(actor) and Don Mattingly (baseball).

For most of my 20 year photographic career I have been employed as a newspaper photojournalist but I have also been in arts administration (Center for Photography at Woodstock) and worked as a photo assistant in New York City. Through this time I have also maintained an active personal photographic life, perhaps so, that I take more photographs in my "off" time.

List of things that matter:

I have four children and one wife.

I shoot darts well.

I will speak Spanish or French in the near future and maybe English as well.

I have traveled a lot (India, Thailand, Europe, Mexico, Cuba, Ecuador 48 of 50 states driving cross country 5 times) as Somerset Maugham wrote in 'In a Strange Land' “I am of roving disposition; but I travel not to see imposing monuments, which indeed somewhat bore me, nor beautiful scenery, of which I soon tire; I travel to see men.”

I had Anorexia Nervosa at 12 years old.

I own a saxophone and will play it well one day. (I love jazz.)

I believe.......it is often better to travel then arrive.....I use my talent for my photography and my genius for living.....humanity first, art second and the rest will come.

"Before you speak, ask yourself: is it kind, is it necessary, is it true, does it improve on the silence? -- Shirdi Sai Baba, Indian Prophet.

Michael P. Farrell