Diana Michener: Twenty Eight Figure Studies

Description

How to represent sex as a place of ecstasy rather than pornography? How to transcend the unavoidable physicality of the sexual act, sometimes tender, sometimes violent, to reach what Diana Michener calls "the place of communion ... the unknown, the cosmic"? Michener initially considered depicting live models for this book, yet finally decided to photograph stills from pornographic films, transforming the hyperreality of the sex industry, its tarnished colored gloss, into something more ambiguous, timeless and expressive. The figurative forms of sex are often (just) recognizable in Michener's black-and-white pictures: a kiss, breasts, entangled limbs; but just as often they are not. Bodies are simplified and blurred, seeping into abstraction and darkness, hinting at yet never embracing explicitness. In images both graphic and impressionistic, Michener's self-declared goal steadfastly remains "to transform into the visual what is emotional and mental."

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 for Social Research. Michener has exhibited internationally, including a retrospective at the Maison Europeene de la Photographie in Paris in 2001. Her books with Steidl include the award-winning Dogs, Fires, Me (2005), 3 Poems (2006), Sweethearts (2009) and Figure Studies (2011) and A Song of Life (2018).

Without installing a voyeuristic look, 'Twenty-eight Figure Studies' is Michener's successful attempt to address the ecstasy of life by elevating the violent and raw act into a touching art form.--Linda Zhengova "GUP Magazine" A black and white exploration of human intimacy and the heightened cognitive euphoria it can evoke, Michener presents photographic stills of subjects from films, suspended in moments of obscured and carnal pleasure. Blurry, grainy, and at times, barely recognizable, figures are portrayed in the private act of intercourse; the imagery unequivocally brazen and emotionally aware.--Sarah Sunday "Provokr" Bodies are simplified and blurred, seeping into abstraction and darkness, hinting at yet never embracing explicitness. In images both graphic and impressionistic, Michener's self-declared goal steadfastly remains "to transform into the visual what is emotional and mental."-- "L'Oeil de la Photographie" Known for her numerous black and white series examining the living - and the dead - in its many forms, the American photographer Diana Michener recently published at Steidl not one but two monographic works. A simultaneous dive into two apparently antagonistic series, exploring on one side the intimacy of bodies and on the other the immensity of nature.--Matthieu Jacquet "Numero"