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| Duane Michals - Magritte with hat |
Duane Michals' show at Fundación Mapfre runs until September 20. Jonas Cuénin writing in the Eye of Photography has this to say: The American photographer Duane Michals is the subject of a retrospective exhibition on view until September 20th at Fundación MAPFRE’s Casa Garriga i Nogués exhibition space in Barcelona.
Working, teaching, chatting or just living: whatever he’s doing, Duane Michals is a man with a big heart which has always made him a photographer unlike any other, totally committed to authenticity and the extraordinary. Love of the imaginative, love of whimsy, humanity, knowledge, curiosity, and humor: now eighty-one, this child of a hardscrabble family from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, seems to have inherited a state of mind like no other, a unique blend of absolute intellectual freedom and the omnipotence of dreams. There’s no resisting his vehemence, his bulwark against facility or the mockery that shields a humility success has never compromised. He wields provocation like a schoolkid dealing with a teacher, laughing at the world and other people, but never contemptuously: just mischievously, throwing down the gauntlet to the rules and regulations. “Doctor Duanus”, as he likes to call himself, combines a gentle gaze and a muted voice with a fondness for plain talk. He uses words to accompany his wonderment at simple things: and the result is a poetry of the everyday that segues into a theater of the fantastic when, to add a touch of romance, he mutates into a street clown or an actor in a drama. It’s almost as if the atmosphere of Georges Méliès’ films was back, and with it a hankering for tales of the marvelous. There’s a part of Duane Michals that is neither photographer or artist, two words almost banished from his vocabulary but something else: a being beyond any pigeonholing, a kind of kid-style magician.
You can read the full article HERE.
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| Duane Michals - Hockney |
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