Michael O'Brien

Michael O'Brien (born June 27, 1950) is an American photographer noted for his portraiture and documentary photography.

Over the past four decades, O'Brien has photographed subjects from presidents, celebrities, and financiers to small-town Texans, including ranchers, beauty queens, writers, and bar owners.

Michael O'Brien was born on June 27, 1950, in Memphis, Tennessee.

In high school, he set up a darkroom in his grandmother's basement with his friend Chris Bell and started photographing his close friends Alex Chilton, Andy Hummel, Jody Stephens and Bell in a band called Big Star.

O'Brien has stated that because he "lacked the musical talent" to join the band, he picked up a camera instead.

O'Brien graduated from Memphis University School in 1968, after which he attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee.

At college, he pursued a degree in Philosophy and became a photographer for the student paper, the Daily Beacon, earning four dollars for each published picture.

That money, together with occasional freelance jobs, helped O'Brien put himself through school.

A turning point came when O'Brien met Jack Corn, a staff photographer for the Nashville Tennessean, and saw his documentary photography series on the coal mining community in Appalachia.

By the time he graduated as a Philosophy major in 1972, O'Brien had amassed a substantial portfolio of black-and-white photographs.

O'Brien is married to Elizabeth Owen O'Brien, former reporter with LIFE magazine.

In 1973, The Miami News hired O'Brien as staff photographer.

He covered everything from violent crime scenes, such as double homicides, to portraits for the paper's "Cook of the Month" feature.

With three assignments a day, the challenge was to "think of different ways to present stories."

On the evening of Richard Nixon's resignation speech, August 9, 1974, The Miami News sent out all its staff photographers.

O'Brien was sent to Duffy's, a blue-collar bar in Coral Gables.

"It was a dark bar, but I set up strobes and used a Nikon with Tri-X film. During the speech I saw three men at the bar with their backs turned as Nixon resigned. Their apathy summed up the mood of the country."

The Miami News used the photograph the next day for their front-page story.

In 1975, O'Brien developed a documentary feature about homelessness.

After seeing a man camped out under an overpass, O'Brien stopped his car and met 57-year-old John Madden.

The men developed a friendship, during which, with Madden's permission, O'Brien followed and photographed him for six months, where he documented Madden waiting in food lines, drinking with friends, sleeping in public spaces, and getting booked into jail.

O'Brien's "vivid and empathic chronicle of homelessness" won a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.

In 1977, O'Brien won a second Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "Culmer: The Tragic City", a photo essay of Miami's downtown ghetto.

O'Brien has described his six years with The Miami News as "the favorite part of my career."

In 1979, O'Brien moved to New York City and began his career as a freelance photographer.

In 1980, LIFE magazine published his ten-page black-and-white photographic essay capturing the heroic efforts of Nurse Charlotte Sheehan at the Burn Center in New York Hospital.

The following year, LIFE featured O'Brien's photographs of the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill at Northampton State Hospital for its story, "Emptying the Madhouse: The Mentally Ill Have Become Our Cities Lost Souls".

O'Brien photographed subjects such as coal mining, Australian portraits, river oaks, and birding for feature stories in the National Geographic.

In 1985, LIFE sent O'Brien to Austin, Texas, to photograph Willie Nelson.

In 1988, O'Brien took on his first assignment for a major advertiser, photographing athletes in a Philadelphia locker room for Nike.

He went on to work for such clients as Kodak, Apple Computer, Visa, Wrangler Jeans, and Bank of America.

O'Brien stood out for using real people rather than models in costumes.

For Apple's "What's on Your Powerbook Campaign", O'Brien photographed incongruous pairings of people holding laptops, including Todd Rundgren and Jesuit priest Don Doll.

The result earned a CLIO Award and was later named by Photo District News (PDN) one of the best ad campaigns of the last 25 years.

Writing of O'Brien's aesthetic development through this period, Catherine Calhoun observed in Photo District News that O'Brien's "editorial work evolved in such a way that, by 1988, when he shot a pull-out, 28-image portfolio of Australians for National Geographic, his photographs had become thoughtfully composed pictures that combined passion with a hint of wit. His edgy black-and-white grit had been replaced by a soft, warm overall light and deeply saturated colors."

O'Brien returned to Texas in 1989 to shoot a cover story on Austin for National Geographic.

The Smithsonian Museum acquired the 1989 portrait of Willie Nelson for the National Portrait Gallery.

Joel Dinerstein, co-curator of an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery called American Cool, commented on the iconic quality of O'Brien's Willie Nelson portrait: "It is done in colors as if he is part of the American landscape. It's so commemorative, it could be a stamp."

The results helped National Geographic win a National Magazine Award for photography in 1991.

O'Brien has completed three books: The Face of Texas: Portraits of Texans (2003), updated with 24 new photographs in 2014; Hard Ground whose portraits of homeless individuals are paired with poems by Tom Waits (2011); and The Great Minds of Investing (2015), a collection of 33 portraits of famous investors such as Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Joel Greenblatt, and Bill Ackman, with accompanying profiles written by William Green.