Marco Livingstone

Duane Michals

Over the last four decades, Duane Michals has forged a challenging new aesthetic that rejects photography's traditional documentary bias and instead explores his own subjective vision. Playful, conceptual, and deeply personal, his work includes narrative sequences that have been carefully staged as well as photographs that he writes or draws on after developing. Influenced by such artists as Rene Magritte, Michals freely mobilizes all available technical resources to realize his vision, including double-exposure, blurred movement, composite images, photomontage, and other "tricks" spurned by traditionalists. This extraordinary retrospective explores the full range of Michals's work for the first time. Organized by the themes that have preoccupied him throughout his career -- estrangement and transformation, dreams and desires, time and memory -- this book includes images from all of Michal's celebrated sequences and portfolios as well as commercial work and portraits of Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Warren Beatty, Jeanne Moreau, and other intriguing personalities. For anyone who admires photography at its most ambitious, provocative, and personal, The Essential Duane Michals will be an essential book.

The Essential Duane Michals

Salute, Walt Whitman

ABCDuane: A Duane Michals Primer

Duane Michals, the subject of a major travelling retrospective exhibition organized by the Carnegie Museums, has long been recognized for his inventive photo sequences, which shaped the work of several generations of artists. But even as he is enjoying wide acclaim, a central body of work by the 83-year-old artist remains little known. For decades a sought-after editorial photographer for leading magazines, Michals portrayed outstanding creative personalities of our era. This comprehensive selection of his inventive portraits (many not previously published in book form), accompanied by Michals's inimitable, sometimes hilarious, observations and reminiscences, will delight his many fans. Included are iconic images of performers such as Barbra Streisand and Johnny Cash; contemporary artists including Andy Warhol, David Hockney and Jasper Johns; outstanding authors like Norman Mailer and John Cheever; and 'old masters' of modern art including Ren� Magritte and Balthus.

Portraits

Duane Michals?

Renaud Camus

Il n'a pas inventé la narration séquentielle en photographie mais c'est lui, sans conteste, qui l'a imposée, qui lui a donné une forme et qui en a chargé le sens. Surimpressions, réflexions, doubles expositions, textes écrits sur l'image, tous ces procédés qu'il utilise avec une extraordinaire aisance l'aident à répéter que " l'important n'est pas l'apparence des choses, mais leur nature philosophique ". Duane Michals occupe une place d'honneur dans la lignée des photographes qui ne surprennent pas le moment mais qui le créent

Ronald H. Bailey

The Photographic Illusion

The Portraits of Duane Michals 1958-1988

Album

Maia Coven-Reim

Duane Michals, the Illustrated Man

Sleep and Dream

Take One and See Mt. Fujiyama, and Other Stories

Joel Grey

Duane Michals returns to the poetry of twentieth-century Greek poet Constantine Cavafy for inspiration for his most recent work. Michals' images loosely illustrate Cavafy's poetry, while investigating themes of lost time, love discovered and remembered, and the sublime realm of the surreal.

The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy

... High style photographers tend to take the same portrait over and over again. It is essentially the same picture, only the face has been chaged to protect the innocent. Each person should be a different solution. The photographer should approach each sitting as if he had never taken a portrait before. He should be surprised by what he has done. .... Duane Michals

The Portraits of Duane Michals, 1958-1988

The Nature of Desire

If I indulge myself and surrender to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of Rene Magritte. It was August, 1965. I was thirty-three years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumptions about photography. This book records Michals visit with the great Belgian painter of inverse worlds and bizarre hybrid forms. Michals invites the viewer to follow him on the exciting journey to the private sphere of an artist who at the time inspired and intimidated him. The still lifes taken in Margrittes house and the portraits of the inhabitants, Margritte and his wife, are distant and intimate, private and representative, humorous and calm at the same time. They reflect the high respect the man behind the camera felt for the subjects of his pictures. Duane Michals, born in 1932 made significant, creative strides in the field of photography. In the 1960s, an era heavily influenced by photojournalism and its aesthetic, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives using a distinctive pictorial technique. In 1970 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, hosted Michalss first solo exhibition. Since then his work has been widely exhibited and it has received numerous awards. Duane Michals lives and works in New York City.

A Visit with Magritte

Duane Michals's Foto Follies takes a satirical and humorous look at contemporary photography, art criticism and the state of today's art market. Whether parodying Wolfgang Tillmans or Thomas Ruff, Andres Serrano, Sherrie Levine, or Cindy Sherman, Michals uses his ferocious wit, keen intelligence and great pictorial skill to create pictures that are both humorous and penetrating, while taking aim at the pretensions that are often perceived as deliberately obscuring contemporary art. Michals provides us with a grand parody that exemplifies his mastery of the visual world and the written word. Duane Michals, born in 1932 made significant, creative strides in the field of photography. In the 1960s, an era heavily influenced by photojournalism and its aesthetic, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives using a distinctive pictorial technique. In 1970 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, hosted Michals's first solo exhibition. Since then his work has been widely exhibited and it has received numerous awards. Duane Michals lives and works in New York City.

How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank

Foto Follies

Presents the artist/photographer's late intimations on mortality, on last questions before one's final departure. Duane Michals has pioneered and mastered the narrative possibilities of his art while continuing to raise disturbing questions and presenting some of the most emotionally resonant and erotically charged imagery of our time.

Questions Without Answers

Duane Michals (born 1932) was seventy when, soon after the death of his mother, he returned to his native Pittsburgh to revisit the house in which he was born and brought up. Its deteriorated state proved a poignant focus for his memories, prompting reveries on mortality and the succession of generations that found form as a sequence of photographs and poetic texts. In The House I Once Called Home, the interaction of words and images provides a sensitive and moving account of one man's journey through life. Michals creates a highly affecting layering of time by superimposing new photographs onto much older images taken in the same location during his earlier life there. Michals is one of America's most consistently individual and original voices in photography. He rejected the documentary emphasis of much of the work that preceded him, instead using the camera to explore the workings of the mind. Michals sought to overcome what he deemed to be the limitations of the single photographic image, both by writing directly onto his prints and by creating narrative sequences of images; these innovative techniques proved immensely influential. Powerfully intimate in its focus, The House I Once Called Home demonstrates conclusively the possibility of exposing universal truths through the most personal events. It is a work to which every reader will be able to relate through the filter of his or her own experience, and which will undoubtedly accrue new meanings as we ourselves return to it at different stages in our lives.

The House I Once Called Home

Photostories

Real Dreams

A seminal and playful 1970s photoseries of "fairy tales for adults," with previously unpublished material Appearing in 1970, Duane Michals' Sequences became one of the key photography books of the decade. Michals' (born 1932) concise narratives, typically composed of six or seven uncaptioned images, were surreal, provocative, mysterious and sometimes flat-out funny. They fueled a radically new direction for a generation of artists exploring the fictional potential of photography. Critic Jed Perl, reviewing a traveling retrospective organized by Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museums in 2014, called the sequences of small, black-and-white images "freshly minted fairy tales for adults. These surreal visual fables were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, when the museum was the arbiter of all things photographic. [...] With [his] cosmic-comic sequences, Michals became photography's genial troublemaker, seen by some as thumbing his nose at the lyric realism of Henri Cartier-Bresson's 'decisive moment' and Alfred Stieglitz's perfect prints. What can all too easily be underestimated is the quick, agile intelligence that Michals brought to his troublemaking. That's what has given his dissident spirit its staying power." Spanning half a century, Things Are Queer: 50 Years of Sequences brings together a generous selection of Michals' sequences, including many that have never before been published.

50 Years of Sequences

Duane Michals: Things Are Queer

Photographs by Duane Michals, opposite Whitman's writings.

Duane Michals

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