Michael Rathjen is a photography-based artist whose work focuses primarily on the landscape and our relationship to it. Michael’s interest in landscape photography can be traced to the documentation of his family’s frequent camping trips throughout BC as a teenager, and more recently, to his travels throughout the southwest deserts of Arizona, California and Utah. An undergraduate degree in chemistry, with a focus on environmental issues, has further informed Michael’s voice as a photographic artist.

Michael has been a part of several group shows including the 2008 Lake Country ArtWalk as the featured photographer and Earth Matters at the Surrey Art Gallery in 2009. Michael’s most recent project On Trees, an intimate portrait of the forests affected by the Okanagan Mountain Park Fire, debuted at Kelowna’s Rotary Centre for the Arts and is represented by the Bellevue Gallery in West Vancouver.

When he is not gallivanting around the woods with a medium-format camera, Michael teaches photography at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC. He also maintains a freelance photography business based out of Vancouver, BC.