Photography and Reality: 1958-1990
Photography and Reality: 1958-1990 is a compact survey of more than three decades of Duane Michals's work. Olympus's European Photo Gallery published it at a moment when Michals's staged, text-annotated images had already reshaped what a photograph could say.
The 157-page volume is printed in illustrated paper covers. It moves through Michals's career, from early street and portrait studies made after a 1958 trip to the Soviet Union, to the invented sequences, multiple exposures, and hand-written captions that became his signature. Rather than a single narrative essay, the book works as a compact retrospective. It traces how Michals turned the photograph from a document of fact into a vehicle for memory, desire, and philosophical speculation.
Michals published more than thirty books over his career, including Sequences (1970), Chance Meeting (1973), and Album: The Portraits of Duane Michals, 1958-1988 (1988). His prints entered the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman House. Photography and Reality catches him mid-career, already established as one of photography's most literary and idiosyncratic figures. It stands as an earlier, gallery-published counterpart to the library's copy of Storyteller (Carnegie Museum of Art / DelMonico Prestel), the later museum retrospective of his work.
