The essential Duane Michals

Since taking his first pictures four decades ago, Duane Michals has established himself as an artist who has reinvented the medium of photography from an instrument for recording the visible world to an agent of thought and emotion. Michals has made use of all the tricks of the camera and darkroom - including double-exposure, blurred movement and photomontage - in order to construct images that provide his visions with the veracity of a witnessed event.

From the 1960s he began to supplement photographs with texts and to create narrative sequences of images. Highly influential among photographers, these innovations have led to other inventive strategies: texts without photographs, or photographs paired with drawings or obscured in paint. But formal and technical considerations have never become an end in themselves; rather they have served Michals's need to communicate themes of growing subtlety and to express his ideas on such matters as the spirit, mortality, desire, human relationships, politics, time and memory.

The works brought together in this book - whether commissioned or made for himself, and whether previously unpublished or already familiar to his admirers - demonstrate the rare ability of an artist to be freed of all restraints and preconceptions while remaining always true to himself.