50 Years of Sequences brings together a generous selection of MichalsвЂ™ sequences, including many that have never before been published. ThatвЂ™s what has given his dissident spirit its staying power.вЂќ Spanning half a century, Things are Queer. What can all too easily be underestimated is the quick, agile intelligence that Michals brought to his troublemaking. His interest in art began at age 14, when he began taking Saturday-afternoon watercolor classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. With cosmic-comic sequences, Michals became photographyвЂ™s genial troublemaker, seen by some as thumbing his nose at the lyric realism of Henri CartierBressonвЂ™s вЂdecisive momentвЂ™ and Alfred StieglitzвЂ™s perfect prints. Duane Michals was born in Mckeesport, Pennsylvania into a typical working-class environment: his father was a steel worker and his mother a housekeeper. These surreal visual fables were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, when the museum was the arbiter of all things photographic. Critic Jed Perl, reviewing a traveling retrospective organized by PittsburghвЂ™s Carnegie Museums in 2014, called the sequences of small, black-and-white images вЂњfreshly minted fairy tales for adults. They fueled a radically new direction for a generation of artists exploring the fictional potential of photography. MichalsвЂ™ concise narratives, typically composed of six or seven uncaptioned images, were surreal, provocative, mysteriousвЂ•and sometimes flat-out funny. Appearing in 1970, Duane MichalsвЂ™ Sequences became one of the key photography books of the decade.

Duane michals sequences