Photographs from the Floating World

Artists such as Degas, Whistler, and Toulous-Lautrec reinterpreted the Ukiyo-e aesthetic, the popular genre of woodblock prints produced during the Japnaese Edo period’s “floating world” of sophisticated, urban culture (c. 1620–1867). More than a century later, Duane Michals presents a modern and personal approach to this artistic tradition. Inspired by the work of Bonnard, Vasarely, Vermeer, and Vuillard, Michals’s colour photographs fuse Eastern and Western influences to present scenarios that blur the boundaries between fantasy and reality, and explore the enigmatic, floating nature of contemporary life. Although he has previously used colour film for commercial projects, “Photographs from the Floating World” marks the first occasion that Michals has used colour in his personal work. Images from this series describe discrete moments with the powerful brevity of Japanese haiku: a flower blossoms, a woman waits for someone, a man builds a card house, a cat sees the ghost of his dead master.
Duane Michals, born in 1932 made significant, creative strides in the field of photography. In the 1960s, an era heavily influenced by photojournalism and its aesthetic, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives using a distinctive pictorial technique. In 1970 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, hosted Michals’s first solo exhibition. Since then his work has been widely exhibited and it has received numerous awards. Duane Michals lives and works in New York City.