The "SOME PEOPLE" Essays
On Fatherhood, Health and Love: Less in the Head and More in the Heart by Michael Christopher Brown | Edited by Kimberly J. Soenen
(Untitled. December 2018. Photo by Michael Christopher Brown.)
After 20 years of life as a semi-nomad, living out of offices and storage containers and other spaces around the world, I moved into a house in Los Angeles in 2017. It was the first time since leaving my parents’ home as a teenager that I felt a sense of home.
As I was dealing with traumas and the effects of working in conflict areas around the world for a number of years, the move also helped kick-start a healing path that resulted in a more centered and grounded self.
With the birth of our daughter, Poppy, in late 2018, I looked at this tiny human in front of me with her simple needs, peering out at the world, without labels, in observation of her pure consciousness. I felt any lingering self-absorption and urgency for work and pursuits lessen, as my world also seemed simpler, less in the head and more in the heart, bringing my partner and me closer, as well.
ABOUT
Michael Christopher Brown was raised in the Skagit Valley, the farming community in Washington State. He is a contributing photographer to National Geographic magazine and is published internationally by top-tier publications and news organizations. His photographs have been exhibited at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Instituto Cervantes, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Brooklyn Museum among many others.
Brown’s book Libyan Sugar (Twin Palms, 2016)—produced during the Libyan Revolution using a cell-phone camera—won the 2016 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award and the 2017 International Center of Photography’s Infinity Artist Book Award. In 2018 Brown released the book Yo Soy Fidel, which follows the cortège of Fidel Castro, former Cuban revolutionary and politician, over a period of several days in late 2016.
Brown has documented the byproducts of conflict around the world and has also turned his lens on the reality for unhoused persons in Los Angeles in addition to other ongoing projects. Follow him on Insta @MichaelChristopherBrown.