The Idiot's Delight
The Idiot's Delight is a bilingual artist's book in which Duane Michals stages black-and-white photographs of literal idioms and proverbs. Cut, folded, and accordion pages make his sense of visual comedy structural rather than incidental.
Each spread pairs a full double-page photograph with a proverb or figure of speech, rendered in French and English. The text sits on a shortened center page, so it appears only as the surrounding leaves are turned. Half- and quarter-page fold-outs extend some images further, staging sayings such as "Adding Insult to Injury" and "Mum's the Word" as small physical performances the reader has to unfold to complete. Editions Bessard, a Paris imprint, published the book in 2021 as a numbered edition of 600 copies. Sybren Kuyper (Syb), known for structurally inventive photobook design, designed it.
Wordplay and invented scenarios run through much of Michals's photography, alongside the sequences and hand-written captions that made him one of the most literary photographers of his generation. The Idiot's Delight applies that same instinct to the book object itself, turning the mechanics of bookbinding into the punchline. It joins his earlier illustrated-language project Foto Follies (2003), and sits at the artist-book end of a body of work otherwise represented in the library's collection by the museum retrospective Storyteller.
