EO1 Michael Schultz (The Maker Behind the Made)

This has been a long time coming! For over 10 years I've mused on the idea of sharing the stories of the life that sits behind the art, and now the first episode of "The Maker Behind the Made" is live, and it's a conversation with my good friend Michael Schultz.

Mike is a photographer. He's been photographing for over 50 years. He's a Guggenheim Fellow, and his work sits in public and private collections across the country.

But none of that is really why we sat down together...

I wanted to know what was underneath the work. Not the technique, not the gear, not the career highlights. The instinct. The life that produces the thing, rather than the thing itself.

What the conversation is actually about

In the video, Mike opens by telling me he doesn't see himself as a photographer first. He sees himself as a human being, like everybody else, who happens to have some degree of a gift for sight. That distinction matters to him, and it ended up shaping most of what we talked about.

His work covers a huge range; landscapes, industrial workers inside active steel mills, abandoned buildings, portraits. On the surface, none of it looks connected. But he told me the unifying thing was never the subject. It was him.

”It comes out of me, it comes out of my heart.”

- Michael Schultz

We talked about his first decade behind the camera, which he now describes plainly as unhealthy. He'd bought into an idea a lot of creative people inherit without questioning it: that if you have a real gift, it has to be the most important thing in your life. He doesn't believe that anymore. Not a little. Not with caveats.

His actual belief now is closer to the opposite.

A gift has to be managed, not obeyed, or it ends up fracturing the rest of your life instead of fitting into it.

”Gifts are for others”

- Michael Schultz

Meaning, the point was never to serve the gift for its own sake.

A small moment that's stayed with me

Partway through, Mike told me that no one had ever asked him these kinds of questions before. Fifty years of work, and nobody had sat down with him regarding his photography and wanted to understand his philosophy of life is behind his work.

That's the gap this series is trying to sit inside. Not because Mike's answers are more important than anyone else's, but because I think most people who make things carry a version of this same unasked question:

Where are you creating from? What's your philosophy of life, underneath the thing you're known for making?

"The Maker Behind the Made" is a series built around conversations like this one. There will be more.

Thank you, Mike, for your honesty. For sitting with questions you said no one had asked you before, and answering them like they mattered. They did.

If you want to watch the full conversation, it's live now on the Migration Patterns YouTube channel.

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