Maybe Tomorrow is a decade-long, lyrical documentary project centered around my partner’s hometown in rural western Kentucky that explores the complexity of the meanings assigned to, or assumed of, the region by both its residents and outsiders. Curious about my partner Erik’s continued ambivalence about returning to his home after building a life here in New York, I began to photograph this community, which we return to every summer.

As a queer man from the Northeast, I was viewed as an outsider, sometimes with suspicion, sometimes with plain curiosity. In our uneasy shared gaze, we had not seen the likes of each other before. I discovered that inviting people to sit for a portrait became a point of connection and a point of entry to an unfamiliar world beyond my own that sometimes felt unsafe. Building on the portraits, I began to make landscapes and still lives to document where and how these individuals lived. The more I got to know this community–one that is still largely segregated–I had to grapple with, and resolve, my own personal prejudices about who these people were and what this region represented. My images and ideas about this place have grown beyond the initial ones of ruin and poverty, which punctuate the land. The longer I immersed myself in this world, the more I was able to see the complex relationships between the rough edges of rural life and the beauty of the landscape from which that life sprung, and the culture that seeks to preserve it.

This complexity manifested in my range of image subjects as I worked my way below the surface of notions of regional politics, history, and religion–a complicated convergence which celebrates, defines, and oftentimes traps a region and its people in unyielding identities, or forces those who don’t fit in to leave. But not without some sorrow. Maybe Tomorrow is ultimately an open-ended narrative about the ways in which place inevitably drives who we become and the ways in which we seek to understand the homes we can’t quite leave behind.

Michael Young is a lens-based artist whose work explores themes of masculinity, personal identity, community, and memory. He has been named a Top 50 artist in Photolucida’s Critical Mass (2023, 2021), a Top 10 winner of LensCulture Critics’ Choice, and a winner of Feature Shoot’s Emerging Photography Award.

Recent shows include CURRENTS 2023 at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Candela’s Unbound12! and Una historia (no) tan rosa at Archivo Arkhé in Madrid. Young’s images have also been exhibited in Portfolio 2023 at Atlanta Photography Group, Art of Pride at Southeast Center for Photography, Bodily Autonomies at Queer Festival Heidelberg, Center Forward 2022 at Center for Fine Art Photography, and Context 2022 at Filter Photo.

Young’s work has been published in GUP's Fresh Eyes (Documentary and Conceptual Issues), Musée Magazine, Fisheye, LINDA.meiden, and two issues of Der Greif. Online features, articles, interviews, and shows include LensCulture, Humble Arts Foundation, Fraction Magazine, Talking Photographs, The Guardian, Float, and F-Stop Magazine.

For more information, visit: www.mjyoungphoto.com
Interview with Michael Young here