Michael Burns has photographed architecture and landscapes for several decades. His images rationally organize space using architectural structures and available light while also abstracting form and closely recording textures. The photographs in the collection of the MoCP are early contact prints photographed using an 8×10 view camera, which Burns used for several years to photograph urban architecture and enigmatic, vernacular architectural structures he found in the desolate desert areas of the Great Basin in the Western United States. Burns stopped using his 8×10 camera in 1984, after a month-long project photographing the Berlin Wall that was later exhibited in the Seattle Art Museum (1987). In 1985, he began to use Leica rangefinder cameras, working in Seattle, New York, Rome, Paris, and Egypt. In 2001, Burns stopped shooting film and transitioned to shooting digitally.