The Artists

Michael Matzko started out his career as a professional musician. He holds an MFA in music composition and spent years as a professional trombonist and composer in jazz, classical and avant-garde music. Moving between those worlds taught him that one instrument can speak in very different languages. It also taught him that the musicians worth hearing are the ones who sound like no one else.

When he stepped away from performing, he began a new journey, beginning in technology at the lowest level, as a newly hired technician at a startup. Twenty-five years later he was managing four departments for a global corporation. On the surface the work had little to do with music. But it rewarded the same habits: close listening, and a feel for how separate parts come together into something that holds.

Photography came later, and it became the place where the two halves of his life met. For fifteen years he has made portraits in Cincinnati, often with light he does not fully control, a method taken from the experimental composers he studied. He is also a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique, a discipline built on noticing how people carry themselves. That kind of attention shows in every session he photographs.

On Being Human brings all of it into one place. He photographs the sessions, composes the score, edits and colors each film, and shaped the site that brings the films to viewers. Each of those parts comes from a different period of his life, and none of them is there for its own sake. They serve the person in front of the camera. The series is produced by Mindpalette, the studio he runs in Cincinnati, OH, USA.

It took most of a lifetime to collect the tools. The project asks him to use all of them at once, for someone else's story.