When I made those pictures, I knew nothing about photography.
The Last Sentimentalist: a Q. & A. with Duane Michals | The New Yorker: The photographer Duane Michals is perhaps best known for his “fictionettes”: dream-like stagings in which Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, and Andy Warhol have all appeared. These enchanting photo sequences and montages, which are often accompanied by Michals’s handwritten prose, make innovative use of the medium’s ability to suggest what cannot be seen. Michals was born in 1932, in Pittsburgh. He moved to New York in the mid-nineteen-fifties, and he had his first exhibition in 1963, at the Underground Gallery, in Greenwich Village. A prolific photographer, Michals has published his work in dozens of books, including “Questions Without Answers,” from 2001. “Empty New York,” a series of photographs that he produced at the start of his career, is currently on view at the D.C. Moore Gallery, in Manhattan. This fall, the Carnegie Museum of Art will host a retrospective of his work.
