As a young protégé of Jerry Uelsmann, MH Rubin began as a darkroom surrealist; but the advent of digital shifted him to the authentic. Additionally he has spent his life managing and studying a photo collection of thousands of classical works, from Adams and Weston. His principles and practice evolved from that education. As part of his practice, he only creates a single physical print of any given image.

Rubin’s work is both about content and structure. Each image is a stand-alone poem, what he calls a photographic haiku. Rubin discovered that most of the modernist photos he emulated growing up unwittingly subscribed to the principles of haiku. After decades of practice he identified their common properties—two uneven beats, a small twist. Haiku don’t say something directly, but allude to it. “Moment” more than “object.” Quickly and spontaneously created. Never staged and always drawn from Rubin’s immediate experiences, the poems are biographical and, like haiku, sometimes a little funny.  

Rubin has had creative roles at Lucasfilm, Netflix, and Adobe. He has a degree in neuroscience from Brown University, and is an accomplished author, storyteller and educator. His work is in many private collections.