Duane Michals, Photographer (Presentation by: Melanie García-2011-Atlantic University College of PR)

DUANE MICHALS Fotógrafo americano

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Melanie García Sosa · Técnicas en Fotografía Digital (Sec. 2) · Prof. Farrique

Overview

Duane Michals has a long and accomplished history of transgressing photography’s norms – he has painted over, written on, and arranged photographs into highly personal stories. Evoking the passage of time, Michals’s sequenced imagery, such as Gilles, presents arrested moments in time, an interrupted continuity. These tableaus of text and image make real the invisible reality of relationships, emotions, and fantasies. Michals has also successfully applied his distinctive style to the very public realm of commercial photography.

05/10/2011

Melanie García Sosa · Técnicas en Fotografía Digital (Sec. 2) · Prof. Farrique 2

Biography

Duane Michals was born in 1932 in Pennsylvania. He received a BA degree from the University of Denver in 1953, and since 1958 has worked as a freelance photographer. Michals has worked extensively as a commercial photographer; as an artist he is perhaps best known for his sequenced black-and-white images. Michals’ work is included in numerous international collections; exhibition venues include The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; White Columns, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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Duane Michals Famous Quote

"We are a brilliant and unknown moment, suspended between memory and anticipation, anxious in our uncertainties, and doomed to fade with our consciousness. How can such a mystery be photographed?“

- Duane Michals

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Important Facts

His role models are Walt Whitman, René Magritte, and Balthus.

He worked as a commercial photographer for Esquire and Mademoiselle.

In 1968, the Mexican government hired him to photograph the Olympics.

Much of Michals' work is vintage.

Michals is known for "blurring the boundaries between photography and philosophy" by creating visual narratives of photography, poetry, illustrations and text to capture his subjects.

His most popular image is "All Things Mellow In The Mind“.

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©PDN Legends Online 05/10/2011


http://www.pdngallery.com/legends3/michals/1.html

Dr. Duanus' famous magic act

If there is one thing that can be said of photographer Duane Michals, it is this: he is the ultimate original. Original in thought, in beliefs and in the execution of his images, Michals has succeeded in creating a luminous career by ignoring - in fact, defying - the established boundaries of the medium. He has spent a lifetime re-examining and re-inventing the very nature of the still photograph.

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Rather than describe the outward realities that have so long fascinated photographers, Michals has turned the camera and his vision inward- confronting and attempting to describe the intangible landscapes of his own emotions, fears, dreams and desires.

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Magritte "People often ask me why I

was the person who came into photography and took away from it not that I was reproducing reality as found on the street, but I was going into another kind of reality," says Michals. "When I came on the scene as a photographer in the early 1960's, to be a photographer meant you could be Ansel Adams or Garry Winogrand or Robert Frank or Bresson, but my whole mental fix, the way I viewed life was really quite different than looking at life." For Michals, that different view was fueled by an insatiable curiosity, that was not limited to people, places or things, but was much broader--pondering the very nature of existence.

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Claes Oldenburg "Being accepted has

never been an issue. I mean, it's so funny because somehow we always feel that people have to work in terms of an audience or in terms of career and all those things and, of course, if you've had the shelf life I've had, it is a career.“

- Duane Michals

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A story about a story "How foolish of me to

believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearances of trees and automobiles and people with reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing."

- Duane Michals

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Who am I? While most photographers

concern themselves with describing the physical appearance of the world around them - the people, the places, the things - Duane Michals has devoted a lifetime to describing the invisible and intangible world within his imagination. "In my case, it's been an interior dialogue and not an exterior dialogue. The question is: 'Who am I?'," says Michals of his quest. "That's what this whole evolutionary journey has been about, with no end in sight, and that's why it's so exciting because I have to define myself." Too many photographers, says Michals, look no farther than the surface, not only of the things they photograph, but of their own lives and emotions.

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- Duane Michals

"Photographers are always photographing the package," he says. "But they would never think to open up the box. Well, I'm interested in the contents, because once you start opening up the box, it's like a Chinese box, there's always another box inside - so it's limitless." "I am what is being experienced, the universe focused in the eye of the beholder. There is a quality of sensation felt as myself, which like the "I" of the hurricane is a calm center of the storm of awareness..."

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Time is such a funny thing

"Art is not fashionable. That's why fashion and art are two different things. Fashion can never be art because fashion deals with whim, what is temporary, what changes, what is transient, what is now and not now. Art has to deal with issues that are timeless, that never change.“

- Duane Michals

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The illuminated man Another equally ethereal

concept that Michals has tried repeatedly to reveal with his camera is the notion of human spirituality and enlightenment. "I have been interested in spiritual things forever and I always will be," he says. "I'm curious about everything. I'm curious about physics, I'm curious about who's speaking, I'm curious about the very nature of my very existence - and that is illumination."

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“The illuminated man”

Michals' contention - and the theme of one of his more famous images "The Illuminated Man" - is that while we all possess the power of finding illumination, or an enhanced consciousness, most of us totally ignore it.

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A man dreaming in the city

"And then I did a variation with a man dreaming in the city, too, which was, again, at night. And I simply did a time exposure. There's no trick, I mean, there's nothing else to do. Bill Brandt said all good photographs have atmosphere, I love that, and I think that these photographs have their own atmosphere.’’

- Duane Michals

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Joseph Cornell A master of honest and

inventive portraiture, one of Michals' favorite subjects are other artists - in this case, the creative but reclusive genius Joseph Cornell, famous for his compartmentalized box creations. Interestingly, like many of Michals' (and Hans Neleman's) photos, Cornell's boxes strung together tiny bits and fragments of life's experiences to kindle much broader emotional insights.

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Primavera "Well, photographers

are always photographing the package. But they would never think to open up the box. Well, I'm interested in the contents, because once you start opening up the box, it's like a Chinese box, there's always another box inside. So it is limitless. So, my version of reality means I believe in the tears, I believe in the reality of anxiety.“

- Duane Michals

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Arthur in Venice "I wrote a little essay in my

portrait book called 'I'm much nicer than my face' - If you never saw me before and you take one look at this guy, and you think, well, he's an older guy you know nothing about me, and and it would be interesting to hear what you would invent about me - 'Who is this guy?' I'm much more interesting than anything you could possibly come up with. I'm an extremely interesting person. You'll never see it looking at me.“

- Duane Michals

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De Kooning "Photographers tend not

to photograph what they can't see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we're going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?“

- Duane Michals

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Self portrait as if I were dead

"How could it be that one day I will say goodbye to all of this and miss the lilac spring, the May times whistling on the wing, and the robin's kiss? In the summertime, when days and evenings are in rhyme, you will not find me in the grove among the lilies in repose or weeding in the garden path where scented seedlings hold on fast. When autumn falls I'll cast no shadow on the wall or hear the owl's haunted hoot high above the rotting root. When all is orange russet red I will not be with you in bed.

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- Duane Michals

“The day the silent snow descends and lolls to sleep all living friends, I too will slumber in the earth among the seeds and squirrel's birth. Who will miss me? Who will care? When I am called and no one's there?”

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¡Gracias! 05/10/2011


Documents

Duane Michals, Photographer (Presentation by: Melanie García-2011-Atlantic University College of PR)