Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals

Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals is the catalogue for a retrospective that treats Michals less as a photographer than as, in his own description, a teller of stories who happens to use a camera.

The book reproduces more than 75 works spanning Michals's career, from the early sequences The Spirit Leaves the Body, Paradise Regained, and Chance Meeting to later series such as The Bewitched Bee and Who Is Sidney Sherman?, alongside the handwritten texts and poems Michals inscribed directly onto his prints. Essays by Linda Benedict-Jones, Allen Ellenzweig, Marah Gubar, Adam Ryan, and Aaron Schuman situate this work within twentieth-century photography and take up Michals's recurring subjects of sexuality, sensuality, and childhood, closing with an annotated biographical timeline drawn from archival material.

Michals (born 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania) broke from the documentary mainstream of 1960s photography by building narrative sequences and adding text to the photographic surface itself. The volume accompanied a retrospective that opened at Carnegie Museum of Art in November 2014 before traveling to the Peabody Essex Museum.