Michael R Soluri is a documentary and portrait photographer who documents obscure locations, objects and micro cultures by often confounding representation through abstraction to explore shape, form, meaning and memory.

His current analog film-based project is a meditation on the transcendence of time in context to the hidden surfaces and symbols photographically explored under 1960’s era launchpads at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

He has had assignments and projects that have taken him into cultures not only across America, through Europe, India and Brazil, but also into the restricted, behind the scene work cultures of human and robotic space exploration.

For over two decades his behind the scenes experience has resulted in not only trust, but measurable skill in knowing how to photograph in secure, limited access work environments where his approach to unscripted images reveal moments of craft, skill and humanity.

His portrait, travel, fashion, still life editorial photography has appeared in numerous American, European, and Brazilian print and online media like National Geographic, WIRED(USA/UK), Smithsonian Magazine, New York Times, The Washington Post, New Scientist (UK),Time, Discover, Air & Space Magazine, NPR, Huffington Post Highline, Ciel et Espace, Family Circle, Mother Earth News, Glamour, Grazia, Amica, Vogue Brasil and Claudia.

Soluri is a Simon & Schuster author of Infinite Worlds - the People and Places of Space Exploration, a coffee table book of portraits, narrative text and unscripted photographs on the labor, craft, tools and humanity behind the last space shuttle mission that essentially saved the Hubble Space Telescope. Former senator and astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, wrote the introduction.

Eight mural size images from his series on "astronaut space tools as sculpture" are in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC.

Mural size photographs from "Cave Art Continuum" were exhibited in Lucca Italy at Photolux 2019, and in SHUTTLE at the South East Museum of Photography in Daytona Beach, FL. Other venues are being pursued.

In addition to participating in multiple podcasts, Soluri was invited by Dr. Rebecca Lowe of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University to participate in Orbiting the Rules: A Roundtable on Governing the New Space Economy

Please refer to Media & Exhibitions

Iconic photographs from his documentation of NASA's New Horizons Pluto Mission and the last Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission have been published in Taschen's The NASA Archives: 60 Years in Space by Piers Bizony.

A 25 page Epilogue, "New Horizons: An Abbreviated Photographic Journal" has been published in The Pluto System After New Horizons by the University of Arizona Press.

Based on his participation in the historic STS 125 / Hubble SM4 mission, Soluri received a NASA commendation— signed by NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden: "... for contributions that rival the best that NASA has achieved in innovation and overcoming challenges."

As a result of photographically documenting the ten year New Horizons mission to the Pluto System since 2005, he received a NASA Group Achievement Award "for exceptional contributions in the successful completion of the initial reconnaissance of the Pluto system ..."

His corporate sponsors have included: Legion/Moab papers, Canon USA, EIZO, Cineo Lighting, Glyph Technologies and LiveBooks.

And catalogued by the Minor Planet Center at Harvard’s Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the asteroid 2001 QL307 — located between Mars and Jupiter — has been named Soluri 187981