Duane Michals: A Visit with Magritte

(Hardback)

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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.

Author Bio

Duane Michals was born in McKeesport, a suburb of Pittsburgh, where he took studio art classes at the Carnegie Institute. He received a BA from the University of Denver and attended Parsons School of Design in New York City. Michalss photographic career commenced in 1958, when he travelled to Russia with a borrowed camera and made portraits of people on the streets. Over the following decades, he worked as a freelance photographer for magazines including Vogue, Esquire, Mademoiselle and Life, doing fashion photography and portraits. Michals was made an Officier in Frances Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993, and he was honoured with the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Art, in 1989, and the Foto Espaa International Award in 2001. He lives and works in New York City.