Duane Michals: Portraits


Book Description

A dazzling collection of Duane Michals’ portrait photography, featuring never-before-published images of some of the greatest actors, musicians, artists, and writers of the past fifty years Duane Michals: Portraits presents for the first time a comprehensive overview of more than a half-century of portrait photographs—many of iconic cultural figures—by one of our era’s most influential and entertaining artists. Duane Michals, the subject of a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Carnegie Museums in 2014 and scheduled to travel in 2018, has long been recognized for his inventive photo sequences, which shaped the work of several generations of artists. But even as he enjoys wide acclaim, a central body of work by the eighty-five-year-old artist remains little known. For decades, Michals was a sought-after editorial photographer for leading magazines, portraying outstanding creative personalities of our era. This comprehensive selection of his inventive portraits—many not previously published in book form—accompanied by Michals’ inimitable, sometimes hilarious observations and reminiscences, will delight his fans and engage new admirers. The book features intimate and illuminating images of musical performers such as Barbra Streisand and Johnny Cash; actors from Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams to Tilda Swinton; contemporary artists including Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Jasper Johns; authors such as Norman Mailer and John Cheever; and “old masters” of modern art including René Magritte and Balthus.




ABCDuane


Book Description

The legendary photographer relates intimate themes of his life and art in a scrapbook memoir illustrated by his works—from portraits of Magritte to Warhol, to painted tintypes, and the revolutionary multiple-image sequences and handwritten texts for which he is best known—and by pieces from his personal art collection, now donated to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art. Whether a portrait of Eugène Atget by Berenice Abbott, collages by Joseph Cornell, or drawings by David Hockney, the works of Michals’s artistic lodestars sit alongside his own haunting images—some never-before-published—and his mordantly funny, playful, humble, and heartbreaking observations on art, photography, and life—revealing the creative obsessions of a uniquely beloved artist. The images and texts by Duane Michals assembled here are, like the artist himself—impossible to categorize; perhaps there is no better way to organize them than alphabetically. Whether recalling encounters with many of the past century’s most illustrious artists (Balthus, Duchamp), celebrating literary heroes (Whitman, Joyce), addressing essential human concerns (Grief, Children’s Stories, Homosexuality, God), or revealing deeply personal snippets of life with a partner suffering from dementia (Fred Said)—ABCDuane is a creative autobiography and the perfect primer for Michals’s vastly influential body of work—both for those who have loved it for the past half-century, and those being delighted by it for the first time.




Album


Book Description

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.




The House I Once Called Home


Book Description

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 Essential Duane Michals


Book Description

A collection of the works of American photographer Duane Michals, an innovative and influential artist who has reinvented the medium as an instrument of thought and emotion rather than simply an instrument for recording the visible world. Using works from his entire career, the photographs are grouped together according to the themes that have preoccupied him, rather than on the basis of chronology or formal resemblances.




Now Becoming Then


Book Description

These black-and-white photographs include narrative segments, such as "Amazing Rick Dick, super sleuth!" with staged portraits of Richard Gere, Joel Grey, Cindy Crawford and Erin Taylor. Some pictures have supernatural themes, such as angels, apparitions, and a young man with stag's antlers. Portraits include Rene Magritte, Sting, Burt Reynolds, Liza Minelli, and others.




The Nature of Desire


Book Description




Reframing Photography


Book Description

In an accessible yet complex way, Rebekah Modrak and Bill Anthes explore photographic theory, history, and technique to bring photographic education up to date with contemporary photographic practice. --




Salute, Walt Whitman


Book Description

Photographs by Duane Michals, opposite Whitman's writings.




Questions Without Answers


Book Description

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.