Diana Michener Livres

Currently based in Paris and New York, Diana Michener--who was born in 1940, studied with Lisette Model at The New School in New York and with Ansel Adams at Yosemite and frequently collaborates with her own sweetheart, Jim Dine--has said of Sweethearts , "This work in another form was shown at The New York Film Festival in 1982. It still remains, for me, a study in indecision. The Sweethearts are emblematic of that thing that can exist between couples, when one can not assume the persona of the other." Taking the form of a flipbook, Sweethearts (starring Wallace Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg) is a series of film stills depicting those overlooked, banal and dramatic moments that take place in a couple's domestic space. Sometimes quiet, sometimes animated, the subjects are pictured together in an intimate exploration of the vagaries of love and life.

3 Poems celebrates the expressive relationship between black and white and color in the work of the artists Jim Dine. The photographs and the poems can be read separately and collectively and this beautiful volume invites the viewer to explore the distinct rhythm of both elements and their lyrical overlapping. Co-published with Bose Pacia Gallery, New Delhi

Diana Michener's "Bones" showcases her photographic preservation of bones as treasures, inspired by 19th-century photography. Using platinum prints from analogue film, she captures both human and animal bones from various museums, often in restricted areas. The book evokes an antique album feel, highlighting the significance of bones as remnants of life.

Mortes presents Diana Michener’s reflections on the mystery of death. In three visual chapters focused on different themes, Michener explores her complex relationship to her subject: one of terror and wonder, of scientific fact and the inexplicable, of reverence and acceptance. The first chapter “Heads” shows the heads of cows slaughtered at an abattoir. Fascinated by the ambivalent relationship between the body and spirit, Michener records the intense moment of death. In “Foetus” she documents a collection of deformed nineteenth-century foetuses preserved in formaldehyde in glass jars, capturing what she calls “a terrible beauty in their silence and stillness.” In the final and most confronting chapter “Corpus,” Michener turns her lens upon us, photographing human corpses during autopsy. She touches on our unease with the brute physicality of death while conveying her admiration for the human body as a magnificent construct, as impressive in life as in death. Printed in quadratone on 175gsm mold-made Somerset Book paper from St. Cuthberts Mill, UK

I saw what I saw, and then, all particulars fell away and there was vastness and an immense eternity. - Diana Michener Mirror is a sweeping retrospective of Diana Michener's photography, encapsulating her ongoing journey in the medium across the decades. In three volumes and over 600 images newly scanned from Michener's archive, Mirror covers her work from 1975 to 2021 and includes many as yet unpublished images. Michener presents her oeuvre in lyrical chapters, each exploring a specific theme and including portraits (of friends, strangers, herself), landscapes, still lifes (of Greco-Roman sculpture, mannequins, bones), visual diaries of her travels, and re-enactments of myths such as Narcissus and Leda and the Swan. Short personal texts by the photographer open each chapter, taking us through her memories and giving insight into the images we would otherwise miss.

Being Animal presents Diana Michener’s most recent body of work, poignant photographs of animals that for the artist have become close to self-portraits. Michener began photographing animals unexpectedly during a trip to India in 2006 where, intimidated by the chaos of the street, she wandered into a zoo and turned her lens to its rhinoceros, elephants and gazelles. Haunted by the resulting images of confinement, Michener became increasingly obsessed with them and decided to expand the project, first at the menagerie at Paris’ Jardin des Plants and later in various zoos throughout Europe and the USA. During her visit to each zoo, Michener remained silent and still for hours in front of the cages, almost in communion with these creatures who take on a close to mythical dignity in her photos.

“For in utter darkness, it is impossible to know in what degree of safety we stand; we are ignorant of the objects that surround us…” Edmund Burke Figure Studies is exactly that, studies in the human form. The practice of figure studies has a long history in the visual arts, particularly drawing, but for Michener it is about blurred, close-up, black-and-white photos with a sensual, dark, sometimes menacing edge. Intertwined human forms, body parts bordering on abstraction, and frozen movement are the stuff of Michener’s raw vision. Born in Boston in 1940, Diana Michener holds a Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College in New York and later studied with Lisette Model at New York’s New School. Michener has exhibited internationally, including a retrospective at the Maison Européene de la Photographie in Paris in 2001. Her books with Steidl include the award-winning Dogs, Fires, Me (2005), 3 Poems (2006) and Sweethearts (2010).

Dogs, Fires, Me is Diana Michener's ballad to the light that passes through film to register a world of people and objects that speak as if in dreams. Michener's elegiac photographs map a phenomenological world, a terrain of untilled ground where emotions accumulate in a story without narrative. Many images reappear in unexplained variations, particularly self-portraits which suggest that the self-contained corporeal entity is the primordial filter for all experience. In the words of the artist, "I want to illuminate the human condition. I think all my work really has to do with a wonder at the incredible insistence of the human organsim to survive."