Michael Hanson is an award winning photographer based in Seattle, WA and was recently named one of the World’s Top Travel Photographers by Popular Photography Magazine.
In the midst of a summer sleeping on buses or in chain hotels throughout the Appalachians while playing baseball in the Atlanta Braves minor league organization, Michael started to make pictures. The unique environment, personalities, and lifestyle of minor league dovetailed with Michael’s sensibility for documentary photography. Over the two years he played with the Braves, Michael shot a series that sparked his post-baseball photography career.
After less than a year assisting a fine-art photographer, Michael went solo on his freelance career. His travel/lifestyle work has taken him on assignments to Chile, Mexico, Costa Rica, Belize, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, British Columbia, and throughout the US. Michael has undertaken documentary projects investigating the changing lives of indigenous cultures in Ecuador (oil extraction), Guatemala (native artisans), Chile (mining), Lau Group, Fiji (marine exploitation), Rwanda (post-genocide photographers), and Ethiopia (coffee farming). He taught a photography workshop with National Geographic Student Expeditions in the Sacred Valley, Peru. His fine art images are part of the permanent archive at the Sir Elton John Photography Collection. Although his work has evolved from the first project on baseball, the passion for capturing people and their immediate landscapes in a clean, natural, documentary style remains at the core of Michael Hanson Photography.
Michael is currently working on a 7-week book project documenting urban farming in the US (www.breakingthroughconcrete.com).