Duane Michals: Being Me

In this presentation, legendary photographer Duane Michals will show and discuss new work from his latest book, as well as show one of his short films. Duane’s book will be out just days before this talk and we will be the first to see it!

Duane’s presentation will be followed by a book signing. Duane, at 93, still makes new work every week - in the form of movie shorts (three to five minutes) and PDF mashups of new photos and old photos but, like his books, a sequence of ideas. Ideas such as "Thinking of Thinking" and Death, rebirth, art, desire, relations, and loss.

This work can be found in his newsletter, and on Instagram and Facebook. He starts with an idea and then just creates, publishing every week. See his work here on Vimeo and here on Instagram.

Books will be available for purchase.

***Seating is limited. ONE seat per person.

Speaker 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.

Michals's photographic career commenced in 1958, when he traveled 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.

In his personal work, Michals experimented with combining text and drawings with his images and began addressing literary and philosophical ideas about death, gender, and sexuality.

He employed staged scenes and worked with multiple exposures, sequences, and in series techniques also used extensively in his portraits. Michals's 1970 Museum of Modern Art exhibition and his book Sequences made him an influential figure for an emerging generation investigating the conceptual and narrative possibilities of photography.

In recent years, he has had solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography, New York (2005), the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2014), and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts (2015).

Michals's many books include Homage to Cavafy: Ten Poems by Constantine Cavafy/Ten Photographs by Duane Michals (1978), Eros & Thanatos (1992), and ABC Duane (2014).

Michals was made an Officier in France's Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993, and he was honored with the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Art in 1989 and the Foto España International Award in 2001.

He lives and works in New York City.