Michael Fain

A long-time resident of Aspen, Colorado, Michael Fain grew up in Chicago and attended the University of Chicago. Following college, he worked for over twenty years as an optical and mechanical engineer in high-tech companies in the US and Canada, before returning to live in Chicago. In 1979, he and his wife Judith Barnard, under the pen name “Judith Michael,” authored major magazine articles and eleven best-selling novels which have been translated into forty languages. Michael Fain has been a photographer for over sixty years, and his work reflects the changes in his own life and in the technological aspects of photography. Through those years his photographs have appeared in newspapers, popular magazines and scientific journals.

Twelve years ago, with the explosion of the brilliant possibilities of digital imaging, he converted his darkroom to a digital imaging lab, took courses in the more arcane aspects of Photoshop and fine art digital printing at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass, Colorado, and broadened the scope of his images to blend representational and abstract styles. His images of the natural world in stages of disintegration and growth have been exhibited at: 2003 Aspen Chapel Gallery Photography Show, Aspen, CO (group show); 2004 Red Brick Center for the Arts, Aspen, CO (50-year retrospective); 2006 New Work by Gallery Artists, Camera Obscura Gallery, Denver, CO; 2006 Camera Obscura Gallery, Denver, CO (solo show); 2009 Camera Obscura Gallery, Denver, CO (solo show); 2009 Colorado Council of the Arts Southwest Creative Capital Exhibition; 2010 Federal Reserve Bank, Washington, D.C (permanent collection); 2011 Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts (Featured Artist); 2012 Los Angeles Center for Digital Arts (Electron Salon); 2012 Paepcke Gallery, Aspen, CO (solo show). Additionally, his works appear in over fifty private collections.