Michael Cannon was born in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. He began photographing family and friends with his Kodak Brownie camera at the age of 13 years old.
Having studied photography at Santa Monica College, Michael has taken workshops with Keith Carter, Ray Carofano and John Sexton. He is also the recipient of two Arts Council grants from the Canadian government.
Cannon has photographed his imagery with film practically his entire life, with an attraction to black & white images from the start. It's the way he sees the world and the stories that present themselves to him when he's shooting. It has to do with tonal values that, in his opinion, make the subject matter more interesting. Until a recent spinal injury, Michael developed all of his images in his own darkroom in his home.
While he misses the darkroom, in addition to the hands-on approach to developing his prints, such as in the "dodge and burn process," Michael admits he "prefers film," but has embraced the new technology utilizing the tools available to him in Photoshop as well as digital inkjet printers, to create his style of imagery. Doing so gives him the advantage of keeping his feet in both worlds.
Michael is currently employed as a language instructor at USC, but Michaels employment history has a self-admitted checkered past, working in a number of industries in various capacities. Some of them included a job in a shoe factory, Kentucky Fried Chicken, counted laps at a go-cart track, as a janitor at a Canadian Nuclear Power plant, picked tobacco, worked for a winter in the Arctic Circle, taught English in Phuket, Thailand, worked in the oil patch in Alberta and as a projectionist in a small town movie theater.
Michael has lived in Los Angeles, California since 1991. He exhibits his work in Canada and in the United States.
