Michal Chelbin’s work has been widely shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Her work can be found in many private and public collections, such as: The Metropolitan Museum New York, LACMA, Getty Center LA, Jewish Museum New York, Cleveland Museum of Art, Tel Aviv Museum, Sir Elton John collection, SF Moma and more.

Her critically acclaimed Monograph Strangely Familiar: Acrobats, Athletes and other Traveling Troupes was published by Aperture in 2008 and was awarded PDN’s Photo Annual Book Award in 2009. Her next monograph entitled The Black Eye was published in June 2010 by Twin Palms Publishers, with solo exhibitions in October 2010 at Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York and M+B gallery in LA.

Her third monograph entitled “Sailboats and Swans” was published in fall 2012 by Twin Palms Publishers with solo exhibition at Andrea Meislin Gallery in New York.

Michal’s fourth monograph entitled “How to Dance the Waltz” will be published in Spring 2021 by Damiani Publishers, with a solo show at Clampart NYC.

Michal is a regular contributor to the world’s leading magazines, such as: The New York Times magazine, The New Yorker, BusinessWeek, GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Financial Times, Le Monde and others.

Time magazine approached her to photograph a story of the Israeli hostages taken on October 7, 2023. The cover story for Time was the most heartbreaking story Michal ever worked on. She went into the homes and photographed families who had loved ones kidnapped by Hamas. The raw pain is evident in her images. She thanks Time for giving these families a voice and also thanks Oded Plotnizki for producing this project.

Michal Chelbin’s work attempts to capture human stories in everyday life, those that exist in the space between the unusual and the mundane.
Her images are almost always of people, usually taking the form of portraits. Whether they are small-town performers, prisoners, matadors, or top fashion models, it is their qualities and contradicting traits as humans that interest her.
Chelbin aims to photograph her subjects dislocated from their “performing” environment and set in casual settings, off stage: at home, on the street, or in a park. Some of them wear their costumes, while others are dressed in everyday clothes. She strives to create a seemingly private moment, one where they are not performing or on stage.
The main themes in Chelbin’s work are not social or topical but private and mythical; she searches for people who possess a legendary quality—a mix between the odd and the ordinary.
Her images are vehicles to address universal themes: family issues, ideas of normality, adolescence with its all incumbent and distractions and the desire for fame.

“My images are vehicles to address universal themes: family issues, ideas of normality, adolescence with its all incumbent and distractions and the desire for fame
My intention is to record a scene where there is a mixture of direct information and enigmas and in which there are visual contrasts between young and old, large and small, innocence and experience, normal and abnormal.
My playground lies between the private and the public, between fiction and documentary.
For me, the image is just the tip of the iceberg; it’s the gate to a story waiting to be told and which I try to depict in an appealing yet troubling way.
This story is about a life full of contradictions on the battleground between fantasy and reality.
Many viewers tell me that the world discovered in my images is strange.
If they find it strange, it is only because the world is indeed a strange place.
I just try to show that.”
(Michal Chelbin)