In November 1996 at the Bellevue Hospital in New York, Day was diagnosed with a slow-growing, Grade Two brain tumour called an Oligo Astrocytoma, after which she returned to London for brain surgery at the Whitechapel Hospital in December. This body of work was exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery in London in the same year. The book is by turns both bleak and frank, but it is also a tender, poetic and honest chronicle of young lives. collage every day or so 20th century art.Retreating from fashion work in the wake of the ‘heroin chic’ debate, Day spent much of her personal time over the next seven years taking photographs for her first book, ‘Diary’, a personal visual record of her life and friends, including Tara St Hill and the band, Pusherman with whom she toured America.The material quoted here is taken from an interview with Mr Michaels conducted by Maureen Cavanaugh at the Neurosciences institute, sponsored by the San Diego State University Art Council. You have to – Every generation should reinvent the medium. I mean, the biggest scoundrels can look like somebody’s benevolent grandfather, you know, or – So I don’t know. People are not at all what they appear to be. They’ve got to start thinking outside of the box, not just a little definition of people are what they appear to be in a portrait. Why don’t they photograph dreams? I mean, we spend a third of our lives doing – and I’m sure people have more interesting dreams than their – but it’s – they have to enlarge the menu. Photography shouldn’t be just about observation. Photographers only photograph what they can see and yet the most important things in your life are your feelings: grief, passion, if somebody you love walks out on you. I simply stretched – It’s more like haiku where you just stretch one moment to two moments to three moments to four moments, and it suited me very well because I – Then I could get into all sorts of arcane, esoteric subjects. I was interested in, again, metaphysical issues like what happens when you die? So I did a little sequence called “The Spirit Leaves the Body.” So you saw this dead – supposedly dead man on a bed and I double exposed him getting up, walking away, so I did the moment before and the moment after. To achieve these effects, he would have had to rewind the film to shoot over the previous exposure to reveal increments of motion in a ghostly film When Michaels shot this series there were no digital cameras. Now she is all blurred motion as she moves toward whatever comes next. In the final frame death is gone, and the old woman rises from her chair. He walks to the woman and touches her shoulder. The focus clears as the man comes closer. His image is blurred as he walks toward the old woman. In frame 2, a tall man walks into the frame from the back room. The woman casts a shadow on the wall behind her, and as the woman’s shadow fades, we see another show in the distance, in the room behind where the woman sits. Each frames moves us a little closer to the old woman sitting in a chair before the viewer. This series is called Death Comes to the Old Lady. See, I’m much more interested in what something feels like, so if I see a woman crying, I want to know what’s the nature of her grief? Why is she crying? So I became very frustrated with the limitations of the medium which eventually evolved into my writing with photographs because, again, I was frustrated – so I wasn’t being hip and cool, I’m not – See, I don’t even wear black. I found what interested me were things like what happens when you die? I mean, traditional photographers would photograph a corpse or they would photograph people crying in black at the cemetery. The idea of shooting sequentially sprung from his notion that a single frame only touched the surface of an event, and Michaels wanted to tell stories: The art world knows him because he began to take photographs in sequence. When an opportunity arrose to travel to Russia, he jumped on it, bringing along a camera: “And I took a camera and if I hadn’t taken the camera, I never would’ve been a photographer.” He worked for Time Magazine in advertising and promotional work. He didn’t set out to become a photographer, it just sort of happened. Duane Michaels is a professional photographer.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |