Curated by Linda Benedict-Jones

Maybe because Duane Michals never studied photography, he’s always felt free to take liberties with the medium, bending it to his will and his whim by staging scenes, building narrative sequences, creating multiple exposures, and writing and painting on and around his images. His pictures—dealing with death, dreams, love, beauty, friendship, and the imagination—are unfashionably sincere, subversively playful, and hard to resist. Curator Linda Benedict-Jones, drawing from the Carnegie’s broad holdings of Michals’s output, presents more than 160 pieces made between 1954 and 2013, including examples of Michals’s vivacious editorial work for Vogue and Esquire. The catalogue includes essays by Max Kozloff, Allen Ellenzweig, William Jenkins, and others, while an eclectic group of paintings, drawings, photographs, and prints, (Goya to Kertész) from Michals’s own collection, displayed alongside the show, will provide another sort of insight into the artist’s way of seeing. Travels to the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, Mar. 2015.

— Vince Aletti