Michael Bailey-Gates
Michael Bailey-Gates is an American artist, photographer, and model. He was born in Rhode Island, and currently resides in New York City.
Life
Michael Bailey-Gates grew up in Rhode Island where he worked an after school job at a photo studio. He continued on to receive his BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in 2015.Work
Photographer
In 2013 Bailey-Gates met photographer Ryan McGinley and became a protégé of the artist. Bailey-Gates later debuted his body of work "A Horse The Rough" with New York Times in 2018. The pictures referenced early motion-study photographs "without the gender norms traditional to classical portraiture".In 2021, Bailey-Gates’ first solo exhibition, "A Glint In The Kindling", was hosted at The Ravestijn Gallery, in Amsterdam. Chantal McStay, in a New York Times Style Magazine review of the exhibition, stated the photographs on display "evoked the aesthetics of classical portraiture as they upend conventions of gender and beauty." This body of work was published as the inaugural book by Pinch publishing in 2021.
In 2021 Bailey-Gates was the subject of homophobic backlash after releasing a self portrait commissioned for a Valentino campaign. The brand's designer, Pierpaolo Piccioli, condemned the backlash over the Valentino image.
Horace D. Ballard, in Aperture Magazine, describes Bailey-Gates’ photography as redefining traditional portraiture through "queer, neoclassical portraits" and notes his specialties in portraiture, studio and tableau photography.