About Michael Katz Photography

Artist's Statement

Welcome to my website! I'm a landscape photographer and novelist, interpreting the American West and Midwest for over thirty years. As a writer I was inspired by the essays of Sigurd Olson describing the canoe country of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, and Wallace Stegner reflecting on the West from the Canadian plains to the Grand Canyon. My interest in photography was piqued when I attended a lecture by Ansel Adams, who had just published "Yosemite and the Range of Light." The next spring I attended a workshop at Yosemite with wildlife photographer Tupper Ansel Blake. Over the years I've attended workshops with acclaimed photographers such as Craig Blacklock, Galen Rowell, Bill Fortnoy, Keith Walklet and Tom Bol. All have given me a sense of wild lands and how they touch the human spirit, providing a context to my own discoveries.

Most of these images were shot with 35 mm cameras. The panoramics utilize a Hasselblad X-Pan II.  I stuck with film for a long time before switching to a Canon 5D Mark II and most recently the Sony A7iii.

SIGNED, LIMITED FINE ART PRINTS: Please CONTACT me.  I work closely with my printers to produce the finest prints available on archival papers. We employ Photoshop to apply traditional darkroom techniques -- dodging, burning, cropping, color balance and saturation -- to bring the most out of each image. 

UNSIGNED PRINTS AND RELATED MERCHANDISE: Please access my Fine Art America page.

My comic fiction has been praised from coast to coast. My latest novel, Dearly Befuddled, is a romantic comedy about a landscape photographer shooting the Yellowstone wedding of a woman he's hopelessly stuck on. Check it out at the Books tab!

Hopefully, my images portray the beauty and fragility of public lands that belong to all of us, and convey to others the peace and freedom I find when I put on my hiking boots and leave the road behind.