Updated: January 2003

"The street photographer is a visual jazz musician, all attitude and risk—conforntational, imrpovisational, breaking rules whenever they get in the way.... Michael Spano's street photographs are a kind of visual jam session.... [The photographs in Time Frames] convey how Spano, like John Coltrane, consistently does something new with an old standard.... Spano's technique seems spontaneous, but it isn't. Like those of jazz, photgoraphy's formal habits are so deeply ingrained through practice that composition is going on all the time.... Spano has had to invent photography for himself, veering away from photographic modernism and the sanctity it accords the single-frame im age and the existential moment. For American photography, this is where the sidewalk ended—and where Michael Spano picked up his case and headed for his next gig." —Lyle Rexer for Art on Paper

"...hybrid, denatured street photography, without the 'you are there' immediacy and specificity of Windogrand's or even Moriyama's work. But Spano's wide-frame panoramas, eight-part grids, divided-in-half verticals, and double-exposed scenes address the condition of contemporary city life in elliptical, post-modern fashion, using visual complexity as their metaphor. Only in his solarized portraits of passerby...does he give the eye timee to savor how smart and beauitful his pictures can be." —Andy Grundberg for Bookforum

"Mr. Spano, who has a Master of Fine Arts from Yale, is interested in people, but he is more interested in the technology of the camera and the different ways it can reflect bewildering complexities and disjunctions of urban experience.... The photos provide a heightened, even intoxicated receptivity to the world in all its sensuous particularity and dizzying scope." —The New York Times

"...should leave no doubt that Spano is one of this popular genre's modern masters. He incorporates Winogrand's restlessness, Model's incisiveness, and Levitt's casual humanity, but never makes photos like them or anyone else.... His format changes would seem gimmicky were Spano any less brilliant, but he makes each of them yield, complex, engaging pictures in which nothing is wasted. For Spano, every inch counts." —Vince Aletti for The Village Voice

"Spano's panoramic and multi-image photographs capture the jittery, constant motion of urban life—the rushing crowds, the quick glimpses of individual faces and gestures..... While his work shares certain elements of the photography of Ray Metzker, for example, or even, in another sense, Garry Winogrand and Robert Frank, Spano's photographs look like no one else's." —Photography in New York International

"Roaming the streets of New York City with oddly modified cameras of his own devising, Spano, a graduate of Yale's art program, conflates separate moments of time in single images, sometimes in multiple exposures, sometimes side by side. Other times, he employs solarization, a darkroom process whereby a partially exposed image is exposed to light, with the result being a reversal of values, so that what was dark becomes light. Still others are panoramas wider than they eye can see otherwise. The result of all this is a sensory overload that is true to the fractured nature of contemporary urban life, even while it reminds us that we are seeing formal artifice, not the 'reality' for which these photographs are often mistaken." —"Best Photo Book of 2002," San Jose Mercury News

"...evokes the dreaminess of Gotham, the strangeness, and the coarse beauty that is so alluring to its citizens." —Gotham