Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals

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 at Carnegie Museum of Art, November 2014-February 2015, and Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, March-June 2015, 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 Who is Sidney Sherman? and The Bewitched Bee. Penetrating essays by Aaron Schuman, Adam Ryan, Marah Gubar and Allen Ellenzweig 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.This volume of more than 75 original works will thrill Duane Michals aficionados, while introducing new viewers to an innovative artist who redefined the role of the photograph in artistic expression