Michael Stokes

Raised in Berkeley, California, Michael Stokes is now a Los Angeles–based photographer. At age fifteen, Michael dropped out of high school but eventually resumed his education by enrolling in college, graduating first in his class and Phi Beta Kappa with a Fine Art degree from the film department at Cal State University, Long Beach. Before changing his career path to filmmaking, he was a photography major, learning pre-digital photographic techniques, using darkrooms and silver gelatin film. In film school, he wrote and directed a short film, Alien, which was picked up and shown by film festivals around the world.

Michael is known for glamour-styled photos of male fitness models and wounded veterans of war. To date he has published seven coffee table books, all monograms with the exception of one book, My Buddy, a collaboration with the publisher Taschen, featuring his collection of vintage photos of nude WWI and WWII soldiers.

Books to Date

Masculinity, 2012

Bare Strength, 2014

My Buddy, 2014

Always Loyal, 2015

Exhibition, 2015

Invictus, 2016

Adonis Blue, 2016

Divine Eros, 2019

Deconstructed, 2019

My Naked Soldier, 2020

Sinner or Saint, 2020

From the sales of his books, Michael has donated more than $47,500 to The Semper Fi Fund and other charities that benefit veterans of war and their families.

Michael’s photos have been shared around the world and have been featured on Good Morning America, The Today Show, The Tonight Show, The View, CNN, and The Talk, just to mention a few. They have also been featured in several major newspapers and online periodicals around the world, including The Independent UK, The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, The Mirror UK, Redbook, Daily Mail, Cosmopolitan, People, BuzzFeed, and many more. Michael’s fashion and fitness photographs have been featured on America’s Next Top Model, in Men’s Health Italy, and have been used for more than fifty novel covers.

You can follow his work on Instagram @Stokes_photo