Duane Michals stands as a pivotal innovator in photography, celebrated for his masterful use of series, multiple exposures, and text. Rejecting the conventions of photojournalism, Michals uniquely employed the medium to convey narratives, with his renowned sequences adopting a cinematic frame-by-frame approach. He further enriched his compositions by integrating handwritten text, which doesn't merely explain but rather deepens the images' meaning, offering a voice to his poetic, tragic, and often simultaneously humorous reflections. Michals's distinct artistic vision transformed photography into a powerful tool for storytelling and the exploration of the human condition.
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.
In our fourth book of Duane Michals's work, the artist explores classic themes of love and death through photographs and words. The evocative images and poems collected in Eros & Thanatos conjure memories of love and loss, lust and longing, in what is perhaps the most revealing and overtly sensual of Michals's works to date. The full richness of Michals's imagery emerges from these exquisite, large-format sheet-fed gravures.
Intimate themes of life and art are explored in this scrapbook memoir by a legendary photographer, showcasing his iconic works, including portraits of Magritte and Warhol. The book features painted tintypes and innovative multiple-image sequences alongside handwritten texts. It also includes pieces from his personal art collection, which have been donated to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, offering a unique glimpse into his creative journey and artistic legacy.
“The announced demise of the decisive moment is premature.” Duane Michals 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.
Appearing in 1970, Duane Michals’ Sequences became one of the key photography books of the decade. Michals’ 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.
Catalog of the exhibition held at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Dec. 14, 1983-Sept. 2, 1984. Fashion and the psychology of art / René Huyghe, Académie Française -- Yves Saint Laurent / Yves Saint Laurent -- Yves Saint Laurent: a collage of inspiration / Pierre Bergé -- Yves Saint Laurent / Paloma Picasso-Lopez, Marella Agnelli, and Catherine Deneuve -- Yves Saint Laurent: a chronology -- Yves Saint Laurent / Duane Michals -- Yves Saint Laurent: an illustrated survey.
A satisfying selection of the artist's most notable portraits. Subjects include Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Rene Magritte, Barbara Streisand, Joe Dallesandro, Clint Eastwood, and numerous other celebrities, authors and artists.
