After the success of LIFE AT ITS BEST , the SpazioFoto is hosting a one-man exhibition of about 50 duotone images by a great contemporary photographer.

Duane Michals is one of the best photographers of the American avant-garde who has worked on various subjects, ranging from photography to painting and poetry. He was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1930 but his family came from Czechoslovakia. Inspired by Magritte's surrealism at the beginning of his career, then by Pop Art, Duane Michals is a photographer who has always worked in order to convey some sort of message to his public. Ever since the first photographs, which he took in Leningrad in 1958, and also as a professional photographer in his fifties, he has always tried to overcome the limits of the traditional photography. At the end of the '60s, he brought in a new kind of photography capturing the metaphysical aspects of life, at which the photographer can only hint, rather than simply portraying facts.

Michals' art is different from that of other great photographers of our time. He is interested in portraying people's life with the continuous changes that soon make the present become the past and things be just a memory, a dream or an illusion, rather than events and aspects of the everyday life. He is so sensitive and so far from clichés, that he can look at his subjects in depth, capturing troubles, obsessions and frustrations in people's mind and in their life and trying to understand them in order to make them less worrying. 'I believe that reality actually consists of dreams, fears, wishes and emotions'- said Duane Michals. What is concealed to our eyes would then become the main subject of his projects.

Such subjects were so complex and so delicate that he had to find new and revolutionary expressive forms, which he called sequences and photo texts. Michals used the sequences to challenge the independence and self-sufficiency of images taken out of a context. In Michals' photo stories single images that convey strong metaphorical messages follow each other in a sequence. In 1969, he invented the photo texts. He wrote either short or long texts on the photographs that he had taken, denying the firm belief that images are worth much more than words. While working on such introspective projects, Michals also continued to work on his famous series of portraits of learned men. He photographed his idol and inspirer Renè Magritte, with whom he spent a few days in the atelier where the painter lived in Belgium, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio De Chirico, Truffaut, Robert Duvall, and Pasolini.

The exhibition, which has been mounted and taken care of by Enrica Viganò, includes some examples for each of the three different expressive forms that can be found in Michals' projects. Unlike most of the great photographers of our time, he prefers small-sized photographs, as small images create a sensation of intimacy establishing a closer relation with the public, which is fundamental indeed. 'I'm not interested in a perfect printing - says Michals - I want to convey a perfect idea. Bad prints are soon forgotten, perfect ideas remain. They can even change your life'.

Among the most famous books collecting photographs by Duane Michals are: Meraviglie d'Egitto, published by Denoel-Filapacchi, Paris; A visit with Magritte, published by Matrix, Providence; Real dreams, published by Addison Hous, Danbury New Hampshire.