Michael Tummings

Michael Tummings is a photographer currently based in Germany. For the past fifteen years he has developed both a commercial body of work and an œvre of art photography. A first generation Londoner born to Jamaican parents in 1966, Tummings experienced cultural diversity through the emigrate nature of his surroundings. Living along side Ashkenazy Jews, Indians, Greek Cypriots, Irishmen and with a background of a Jamaican community, which was rich in family values, Tummings crossed cultural boarders quite naturally from an early age. This childhood experience gave him a strong global perspective that found expression in his photographic work from the very beginning. Tummings’s photographs are the product of a sustained immersion into diverse cultures. With anthropological sensitivity to his subjects, Tummings tackles social issues ranging from poverty and racial division to nature. Traversing rural and urban environments, his photographs capture the core of human experience in relation to nature and society. Over the past few years he has especially focused on documenting contemporary nomads: from dislocated white South Africans to Himalayan goat herders. In the latter case, Tummings followed a group of nomadic families through the Himalayan tundra recording their plight due to ongoing environmental destruction and the effects of this ecocide on individual lives. Another project documented women in South African mines. The photo series is an in-depth survey of the social consequences of women being on the receiving end of a male oriented milieu. Recently, Tummings has been increasingly drawn to the question of what the greater family of human beings means as a concept in the widest sense. More specifically, he has delved into this universal subject matter through articulating how military experience and identity is paradoxically the form, which defines separation but equally universality. In all of his work, Tummings aims at influencing the environment that he gets involved with in the least possible way. Tummings deems such an approach as a conscious countermotion against the prevalence of designed realities these days. This is also reflected by Tummings’s preference to work with the 4x5 view camera of a Linhof master technika. A camera, which brings about austere, regal and feathering images of individuals being exposed to their surroundings.