Michael Northrup’s Dream Away, spanning the 1970s and 80s, documents the journey of his marriage to his former wife, Pam, and their shared family life. The project encapsulates a deeply personal yet universal exploration of love, family, and everyday life. Northrup, known for his idiosyncratic vision and use of irony, presents an unfiltered visual diary, capturing the humor, spontaneity, and poignancy of domestic existence.
At its core, Dream Away is an exploration of relationships, memory, and the passage of time. The project chronicles the dynamics between Northrup and Pam, forming an unconventional love story intertwined with themes of personal vision, spontaneity, and the beauty of the mundane. The images range from affectionate and intimate to bizarre and humorous, inviting viewers to reflect on how photography transforms fleeting moments into lasting impressions. Northrup’s approach avoids rigid storytelling, instead offering an open-ended, interpretive space.
Visually, Dream Away embraces the aesthetics of both color and black-and-white photography. Northrup’s use of on-camera flash, a stylistic choice popularized in the late 70s and early 80s, creates stark shadows and heightened contrasts, lending a theatrical quality to everyday moments. The framing often adheres to snapshot aesthetics, with off-center compositions and waist-level perspectives that lend a sense of childlike wonder.
Northrup’s process is deeply intuitive; rather than premeditating shots, he captures moments as they unfold, later uncovering their significance in retrospect. His work is rooted in a perceptual rather than conceptual methodology, driven by curiosity and an openness to the unexpected. Shaped by his upbringing, Northrup's perspective was influenced by his father’s morbid sense of humor as a coroner and the impact of science fiction and horror films, which fostered a vision where the ordinary often merges with the uncanny.
Michael E. Northrup's work from the 1970s and 80s is presented through three books. These books—Beautiful Ecstasy (2003), Babe (2012), and Dream Away (2018)—form a cohesive yet multifaceted visual diary of his family life. The images often overlap between the books, but each offers a different curatorial perspective on the same series.
