“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 Margritte’s 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 Michals’s 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.weiterlesen