Storyteller

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."[The elements of Michals’s work produce] thoughtful and deeply intimate images . . . Storyteller presents critical essays, early and recent interviews with the artist, and reproductions of some of his more important series."


—The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review
"Highly recommended . . . If readers want to treat themselves to the incredibly playful photographic range of Duane Michals, this is the volume to see and read . . . Michals delighted his fans and horrified his critics by combining hand written text with sequential imagery to tell stories, poems, and deeply personal musings that explore profound universal themes like sexual identity, death, religion, and the meaning of life."


—J. Natal, Columbia College Chicago, Choice
"What this collection does best is to illuminate how Michaels’ creative, genre-crossing work has influenced the history of late 20th-centrury photography . . . Michals has spent that last half-century blurring the boundaries between photography and art, between fiction and reality, between the personal and universal, and between artwork and the artists."
—The Gay & Lesbian Review