Over the last four decades, Duane Michals has forged a challenging new aesthetic that rejects photography's traditional documentary bias and instead explores his own subjective vision. Playful, conceptual, and deeply personal, his work includes narrative sequences that have been carefully staged as well as photographs that he writes or draws on after developing. Influenced by such artists as Rene Magritte, Michals freely mobilizes all available technical resources to realize his vision, including double-exposure, blurred movement, composite images, photomontage, and other "tricks" spurned by traditionalists.

This extraordinary retrospective explores the full range of Michals's work for the first time. Organized by the themes that have preoccupied him throughout his career -- estrangement and transformation, dreams and desires, time and memory -- this book includes images from all of Michal's celebrated sequences and portfolios as well as commercial work and portraits of Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Warren Beatty, Jeanne Moreau, and other intriguing personalities. For anyone who admires photography at its most ambitious, provocative, and personal, The Essential Duane Michals will be an essential book.