Duane just turned 80, and our gift is an entire edition of La Lettre dedicated to him. One day in January, 1971, some remarkable photographs arrived at the offices of French PHOTO. They were signed Duane Michals. We published them five times in the following year, and he came t...

21.02.2012[ read full story ]

Born February 18, 1932 in McKeesport Pennsylvania, Duane Michals called Margaret and John, Mum and Dad. Everyone called him Sonny. Attending Holy Trinity School, he was a good Catholic, who believed every lie the Church taught and was a good boy. He delivered the Pittsburgh Post Gazette every ...

21.02.2012[ read full story ]

At McKeesport High School, Sonny was the news editor of The Red and Blue. During his fifteenth summer, Duane Michals found his way to Amarillo, Texas with Jimmy Connelly on a Greyhound bus. There they hitchhiked up to the Oklahoma panhandle to work on the wheat crops. Alas they were too small....

21.02.2012[ read full story ]

During the Korean War, Sonny became a second lieutenant in armor when he was a green twenty-one and luckily exported to Deutschland. The alternative Korea certainly would have been his great goodbye.
Now a civilian again, Duane Michals was hired at TIME, Inc. as a graphic designer. On a lark...

21.02.2012[ read full story ]

Being indecisive Duane Michals became frustrated with the decisive moment and began telling his own stories, thus inventing sequences. Suddenly a one man exhibition at MoMA, amazing! By 1965, Sonny was knocking at the door of the Wizard of Brussels, René Magritte. Yes, he did exist.
Sonny’s ...

21.02.2012[ read full story ]

Simultaneously while doing his personal photography, Sonny always made his living as the most unprofessional professional photographer – no agent, no studio, no staff (except for a freelance assistant), and no overhead. He did covers for LIFE, TIME, Newsweek, Fortune, Mademoiselle, Th...

21.02.2012[ read full story ]

Having liberated himself with language, Michals published many books, but his crown jewel was Questions without Answers, his most philosophic book. He also published a children’s book. A book about Egypt for Denoel of Paris, a Walt Whitman salute plus one for Cavafy, and a story about...

21.02.2012[ read full story ]

With a grant from Paris Audiovisuel, Duane Michals did a series of charming fables about the City of Lights, couture, l’amour, cuisine, literature, Josephine Baker meeting Toulouse, Toklas meets Stein. Next a tale of Quantum and Metafisica for Clara Sels, Dusseldorf, and a satire on contempora...

21.02.2012[ read full story ]

Always inspired by things Japanese, Sonny produced fan shape photographs in color in the manner of Hokusai and Hiroshige with Haiku poetry. Duane Michals now has returned to his early passion, painting on photographs with oils, hands on, the touch of the maker, the exquisite vulnerability of i...

21.02.2012[ read full story ]

It was 2009 and we were headed to the South of France for the Recontres d'Arles. A large Duane Michals retrospective was planned that year, and we were curious to rediscover his work that spanned half a century.

21.02.2012[ read full story ]

Last January, on a snowy Sunday afternoon, I chanced to find my orphaned correspondence abandoned appropriately in the back of a closet. I began to read the words I had written fifty-six years ago and recognized my wrinkleless face in the mirror of those pages, insecure in my illicit...

21.02.2012[ read full story ]