Duane Michals was seventy when he conceived the extended sequence of photographs and poetic texts that constitute The House I Once Called Home. A few years after the death of his aged mother, he returned to his native Pittsburgh to revisit the house in which he was born and brought up. Its deteriorated state proved a poignant focus for his memories, prompting reveries on mortality and the succession of generations that found form both verbally and visually. The interaction of Michals' words and images provides a moving a sensitive and moving account of one man's journey through life. The frequent superimposition of new photographs onto much older images taken in the same location during his earlier life there, at times suggesting the ghostly presence of those no longer with us, creates a highly affecting layering of time that lies at the center of Michals' art. Powerfully intimate in its focus, The House I Once Called Home demonstrates conclusively the possibility of exposing universal truths through the most personal events. It is a work to which every reader will be able to relate through the filter of his or her own experience, and which will undoubtedly accrue new meanings as we ourselves return to it at different stages in our lives.

The House I Once Called Home

MICHALS, Duane

Enitharmon Editions

Duane Michals (born 1932) was seventy when, soon after the death of his mother, he returned to his native Pittsburgh to revisit the house in which he was born and brought up. Its deteriorated state proved a poignant focus for his memories, prompting reveries on mortality and the succession of generations that found form as a sequence of photographs and poetic texts. In The House I Once Called Home, the interaction of words and images provides a sensitive and moving account of one man's journey through life. Michals creates a highly affecting layering of time by superimposing new photographs onto much older images taken in the same location during his earlier life there. Michals is one of America's most consistently individual and original voices in photography. He rejected the documentary emphasis of much of the work that preceded him, instead using the camera to explore the workings of the mind. Michals sought to overcome what he deemed to be the limitations of the single photographic image, both by writing directly onto his prints and by creating narrative sequences of images; these innovative techniques proved immensely influential. Powerfully intimate in its focus, The House I Once Called Home demonstrates conclusively the possibility of exposing universal truths through the most personal events. It is a work to which every reader will be able to relate through the filter of his or her own experience, and which will undoubtedly accrue new meanings as we ourselves return to it at different stages in our lives.

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

Paula Rego has long had a fascination with Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea. In 2002 this culminated in the production of twenty-five lithographs, reproduced here in an artist’s book, along with excerpts from the novel. Marina Warner, in her eloquent and perceptive introduction, examines why Jane Eyre should have inspired Rego’s new work: Charlotte Brontë and Paula Rego share an imaginative ardor that abolishes the veil between what takes place in fact or in fantasy. As storytellers, they really are kith and kin: Rego reproduces the psychological drama in the book through subjective distortions of scale, cruel expressiveness of gesture and frown, and disturbingly stark contrasts of light and welling shadows. Again and again in the story, Jane Eyre is closeted in a small, confined space, sometimes most terribly against her will, sometimes secluded of her own accord: in an early piece of powerful scene-setting, she is locked in the dark chamber where John Reed died and is so terrified by the dead man’s presence that she has a fit. This is only the first of a sequence of experiences when, for better or worse, imagination takes over Jane’s being. Such an emphasis on the fire in the mind and the dark outside might perhaps reveal, without saying much more, how Paula Rego of all artists would respond to Jane Eyre. Paula Rego has been making images out of made-up stories since she herself was a child, and if anything can be said to offer a consistent thread through her astonishing, fertile and multi-faceted production it is this: she has been a narrative artist all along, and one whose stories are not reproduced from life as observed or remembered, but from goings-on in the camera lucida of the mind’s eye. Rego has not lost in adulthood the energy of the child’s make-believe world: "It all comes out of my head,’ she says, ‘All little girls improvise, and it’s not just illustration: I make it my own."

Jane Eyre

Paula Rego

Individual Artists

Paris Escapades is a beautiful book of Paris collages by Sir Peter Blake. A follow-up to his infectiously entertaining and highly successful Venice Fantasies, Blake demonstrates his unerring sense of felicitous and unexpected juxtapositions, a gift for visual story-telling and an eye no less acute for having a permanent twinkle. As with the Venice images that preceded them, Blake features many familiar monuments in his Paris pictures but submerges them in extraordinary events that turn them into the stuff of dreams. There is enough air of reality in some pictures, such as the Seine freezing over, to entrap the unwary spectator. But as elephants are hoisted above Notre Dame cathedral and crowds gather for a charabanc outing or for a mass kiss-in that even festival-going hippies would have found a bit extreme, the beauty and allure of Paris becomes populated by the overactive mind of one of the great imaginative artists of our time. Each of the 28 images in Paris Escapades is accompanied by the artist's wry commentaries, and the book is preceded by an interview with Marco Livingstone in which Blake discusses his lifelong involvement with collage. Hugely entertaining as a visual voyage of discovery, Paris Escapades ends up a window into the methods and thought processes of a much loved artist.

Paris Escapades

Blake, Peter

Under Milk Wood

Internationally acclaimed for its eccentricity and adored for its lovelorn lyricism, Dylan Thomas’s groundbreaking 1954 "play for voices," Under Milk Wood, has long echoed in the imagination of the founding father of British Pop Art, Sir Peter Blake. An obsession that has spanned almost thirty years, this "greenleaved sermon on the innocence of men" has filled the spaces of Blake’s studio, played and replayed on broadcast recordings, and prompted several pilgrimages to Thomas’s creative refuge at Laugharne, Carmarthenshire. All is "strangely simple and simply strange" in the sleepy Welsh seaside town of Llareggub, as the dreams, fantasies and realities of the inhabitants unfold across the cycle of one spring day. At once a lively and humorous depiction of the butchers, bakers, preachers and children, of Captain Cat, Nogood Boyo and Polly Garter – with a ribaldry in which Blake delights – it is also a modern pastoral tale on a Chaucerian scale, a quest for innocence and purity of utterance in a "darkest-before-dawn" world. Revealed here for the very first time with the definitive play text are the "dismays and rainbows" of this great artist’s richly detailed sequences of 110 watercolors, pencil portraits and collages, comprising one of his most distinctive and significant single bodies of work.

THOMAS, DYLAN

Full of the macabre touches and dark humor that have made Paula Rego's reputation, Stone Soup is a new version of the traditional Portuguese folktale by her daughter, the designer and writer, Cas Willing. Typically read to children to encourage cooperation in times of scarcity, the fable has existed in numerous incarnations for centuries. We follow the efforts of a young female traveler in her attempt to save herself from starvation, persuading a suspicious townspeople to supply her with food for her mysterious Stone Soup. All of the thirteen watercolor and ink paintings are reproduced here, bringing together Rego’s expressive cast of figures amidst their troubled landscape.

Stone Soup

Rego, Paula

From the moment the Pennsylvania-born Duane Michals (born 1932) settled in Manhattan in 1956 with the intention of studying graphic design, the metropolitan environment in which he found himself exerted a powerful spell on his creative imagination. Having discovered his vocation for photography in 1958 while on holiday in the USSR, in 1964-65 he began to document New York City in a tantalisingly unfamiliar guise, virtually empty of inhabitants at dawn or dusk. In deeply evocative black-and-white images he depicted storefronts and interiors; deserted stations, subway cars, funfairs and arcades; derelict markets, vacant theatres and diners. Already the hallmarks of his mature style were apparent: a fascination with the sequencing of his images as a way of establishing a narrative, an understanding of the emotive power of locations as sites of epiphany, an instinctive ability to frame the subject within the view-finder and to draw out its atmosphere from the available natural lighting, and a concentration on incidental details and amusing juxtapositions. He soon recognised the potential of these locations as stage sets for the human dramas that he began to make a few years later and on which his reputation as an artist was to rest. It is no exaggeration to say that through his Empty New York images, only a very few of which have been published or exhibited before, he discovered his voice as an artist photographer whose work is full of poetry, philosophical ruminations and a yearning for spiritual and even mystical fulfilment. Day after day Michals would rise at dawn to capture unpeopled sidewalks, bridges and parking lots, architectural fragments, the Hudson River, cityscapes in the mist, skyscrapers and urban nature reflected in the puddles of Central Park. Beautifully realised and now achingly nostalgic, the photographs in Empty New York show us the city frozen in time, just as Eugène Atget, one of Michals’ heroes, commemorated Paris in the early years of the twentieth century. As much social history as photographic reportage, Duane Michals’ pictorial poem reminds us with every frame how he has earned his place among the greats of American photography.

Empty New York

Painting

Product Description In 1964 Duane Michals, already established as a leading American photographer, was commissioned by Robert Benton, art editor of Esquire magazine and later an Oscar-winning screenwriter and director, to make a sequence of photographs for a book on Benton’s home state. The book never appeared but recently Michals discovered in his archive ‘Duane’s Texas tempest in a teapot treasure trove’, the whole brilliant and resonant portrait of that celebrated state – captivating black-and-white images published here for the first time. Tender, witty, poignant and truthful, Duane Michals’ Texas 1964 captures a society in some ways unchanged from its first controversial settlement, with its racial divisions and economic and social gulfs, and in others redolent of the new America – commercialised, confident, forward-looking. Texas 1964 has been designed by Peter Willberg and printed in Italy on 170gsm Gardapat Ultra by SiZ Industria Grafica, Verona. It is published in a first edition of 1000 regular copies plus the signed and numbered de luxe limited editions. About the Author Duane Michals (born 1932) is an American photographer. Michals’ innovative, subtle techniques have been highly influential to many photographers for decades, and his works are in major international collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago; International Museum of Photography, Rochester; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington; the Australian National Gallery of Art; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; National Gallery of Canada; and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam. Michals received a BA from the University of Denver in 1953 and worked as a graphic designer until his involvement with photography deepened in the late 1950s. He is famous in particular for his photo sequences and his portraits: his subjects have included Magritte, Duchamp, de Kooning, Tennessee Williams, Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol. He has had many museum retrospectives throughout the world, and is represented in the USA by Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and in the UK by Hamiltons in London. In recognition of his contributions to photography, Michals has been honored with a CAPS Grant (1975), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1976), the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Art (1989), the Foto España International Award (2001), and an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, Mass. (2005). He currently lives and works in New York City. Duane Michals is an American photographer. He worked as a graphic designer until his involvement with photography deepened in the late 1950s. He is famous in particular for his photo sequences and his portraits: his subjects have included Magritte, Duchamp, de Kooning, Tennessee Williams, Joseph Cornell, and Andy Warhol.

Texas 1964

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The House I Once Called Home

The House I Once Called Home

Jane Eyre

Paris Escapades

Under Milk Wood

Stone Soup

Empty New York

Texas 1964