From Window Magazine: View Finder

He remembers them well: The slide shows of his family at home and on vacation. The photos his physician father took of his patients in orphanages in Romania, Mexico and Haiti. The Polaroids scattered around their home of the operations his father performed, full of bloody flesh and surgical tools. Years passed before Michael Christopher Brown realized just how much they would influence him.

“After seeing my father’s surgical photos so many times, perhaps that’s why I’m able to look at flesh and gore without it really bothering me,” says Brown (‘00, Psychology), a photographer based in New York City, who has captured images around the world of social unrest and war.

On April 20, 2011, shortly after he arrived in Libya to photograph the revolution in Misrata, he was with photojournalists Tim Hetherington, Chris Hondros and Guy Martin traveling with rebel fighters, when an explosive round blasted in front of them. Hetherington, an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, and Hondros, a celebrated photojournalist, were killed. Martin and Brown were severely injured. Wounded in the chest, shoulder and arm, Brown was rushed to the hospital. But surgeons weren’t able to remove all of the shrapnel, which just missed one of his lungs and a major artery in his arm (four pieces remain inside him). He received two transfusions for losing almost half the blood in his body.

Capturing a 'visceral experience'

The 2012 HBO documentary, “Witness: Libya” follows Brown’s work as a “war photographer,” but he doesn’t consider himself one. Since 2003, he has also taken his camera to the streets of Mexico and Mumbai, around a remote Russian island and among the California redwoods, across China and down into the mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His award-winning, internationally exhibited photos appear in National Geographic, TIME and Newsweek, among others. Straddling fine art and photojournalism, Brown’s photos express his personal perspective and poetic vision through hauntingly beautiful and sometimes horrifyingly graphic views of the world.

A professional photographer was the last thing Brown thought he’d be. Born and raised in Mount Vernon, as a kid he took pictures of flowers, wildlife and landscapes with his father, “mainly because it was something he wanted to do with me,” says Brown. Then, at 15, he injured his knee playing soccer. There went snowboarding and wakeboarding, too.

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