Michael R Soluri is a documentary photographer (and author) who explores obscure locations, micro work cultures and tools as sculpture by confounding representation through abstraction to investigate shape, form, meaning and memory.

Among his projects, Cave Art Continuum, is an analogue project of abstract patterns and man-made notations found within obscure, cave-like brick and steel flame trenches located beneath 1960’s era launchpads.

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., and published in his Simon & Schuster book, Infinite Worlds and in print and on-line media like Smithsonian Magazine, New Scientist and the Photo-Letter.

He has created, produced, managed, and photographed scripted and unscripted editorial and portrait assignments and projects on location not only across America, through Europe, India, Central and South America, but also in the restricted, behind the scenes 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 both managing and photographing in secure, limited access work environments where his approach to the unscripted, 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 his portraits and unscripted photographs with narrative text on the labor, craft, tools and humanity behind the last space shuttle mission that essentially saved the Hubble Space Telescope. The Introduction was written by former senator and astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth.

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 and at the Kennedy Space Center’s Atlantis Pavilion.

Chosen by the European based Moon Gallery, a photograph by Soluri is a part of the Moon Bound Book (Moon Gallery, 2026)- the first curated artists’ book heading for the Moon’s surface at the end of 2026.

In addition to participating in multiple podcasts (Space for All, Space Foundation, Photoshelter, B&H Photo Event Space, Ars Technica) 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 (2022).

Based on Soluri's photographic seminars with the STS 125 Shuttle crew, he was commissioned by Aperture Magazine to write Transcendence: Photography by Space Shuttle Astronauts for issue 202 / Spring 2011.

As a result of 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."

Additionally, because of his 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: Moab Masters-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