Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals

by Linda Benedict-Jones, Allen Ellenzweig (Contributor), Marah Gubar (Contributor)

Accompanying a retrospective of the pioneering photographer, this volume of more than 75 original works will thrill Duane Michals aficionados, while introducing younger viewers to an innovative artist who redefined the role of the photograph in artistic expression. A self-taught photographer, Duane Michals broke away from established traditions of the medium during the 1960s. His messages and poems inscribed on the photographs, and his visual stories created through multiple images, defied the principles of the reigning practitioners of the form. Indeed, Michals considers himself as much a storyteller as a photographer. Accompanying a major traveling retrospective of his work, this book features Michals’s best-known early sequences, The Spirit Leaves the Body, Paradise Regained, and Chance Meeting—as well as works from later in his career such as The Bewitched Bee and Who is Sidney Sherman? Penetrating essays situate Michals within the history of 20th-century photography, explore the artist’s images of sexual identity and sensuality, examine his legacy today, and address the childlike aspects of his work—a theme that has never been widely examined. An annotated timeline of Michals’s biography includes rare archival materials and provides a unique glimpse into his life. Wide-ranging and timely, this volume offers a fresh appraisal of a popular artist who continues to create moving and experimental works that speak to a broad and evergrowing audience.

Genres: Photography, Art

240 pages, Hardcover

First published November 25, 2014

Reviews

[Owlseyes]

“I was always jealous of painters. Magritte could have people raining out of the sky and I simply could not do that.”

[Alon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great collection of Duane Michals works and wonderful insightful essays and interviews

[Qinwei Li]

Technically i just looked at the pictures so i can’t really say i’ve read the whole book. But lots if them are not new. It seems like duane michals is not a super prolific creator.

He does have a very close birthday with mine and there were two sequences of his work that highly resemble the stories i’ve wrote for short films. What a coincidence!

[Kathy]

I just saw an exhibit of this mans work at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. I can't say enough about the exhibit!

[Mills College Library]

770.92 S8882 2014