Rochester native Michelle Fagan is a professional photographer who started abstract macro photography as a personal project. With her meticulous attention to color, patterns, and light, Michelle transforms her traditional subject matter - flowers, into something entirely nontraditional. Her shallow focus allows the miniscule lines of her subject to be at once sharp and then fall away. These effects are made all the more dramatic and unfamiliar as they are printed on a relatively massive scale.

Fagan is not happy when she’s not creating. Although she makes her living as a professional photographer, this group of work is a personal project. “I began a few years ago when everything I had been creating was for someone else, and have found a deep satisfaction in the process of playing with light, color and lines to present a deeper beauty than the average person typically sees,” states Fagan. “I am intrigued with flowers, not just the overall view we all see but in the intricacies that make up the whole. Flowers, as we see them on a day-to-day basis are beautiful, but I want to bring to light a fresh perspective that the naked eye doesn’t often see. By taking this macro, extreme close-up view, I use the detailed lines of a flower in combination with light and surrounding color to create a piece of work that most viewers assume is a painting upon first viewing. The shallow focus allows lines to fall out of focus and colors to blend in a painterly way.”

This series is best described as abstract photography. Fagan uses macro photography presented in a large format as a giclee on canvas.

Michelle is a 1996 John Marshall graduate and subsequently studied photojournalism at South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD. She and her husband Shawn own Fagan Studios, a contemporary portrait and commercial photography studio in Rochester, MN.