Duane Michals
The Woman is Hurt by a Letter

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Artist Duane Michals American, born 1932

CultureAmerican

Titles

The Woman is Hurt by a Letter

Date1968

PlaceUnited States

MediumGelatin silver prints

DimensionsImage (each): 3 1/4 × 4 13/16 in. (8.2 × 12.2 cm)
Sheet (each): 3 7/8 × 5 3/16 in. (9.8 × 13.1 cm)
Frame (outer): 35 × 9 1/8 × 1 1/2 in. (88.9 × 23.2 × 3.8 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment Fund, The Manfred Heiting Collection

Object number2002.1660.A-.G

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Special Collections

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionBucking the prevailing genres of art photography—the finely crafted landscape, the shot-from-the-hip street photograph, the flatfooted document of conceptual or performance art, among others—Duane Michals charted new photographic territory beginning in the 1960s. In staged photographs, often presented in narrative sequences, as here, or bearing handwritten legends, he addressed themes of lust, love, and longing, of youth and beauty, death and grief—of lived experience and emotional truth. Michal’s works were so completely outside the mainstream that they initially confounded critics and curators; now, staged photography, images accompanied by text, and openly personal, even confessional, perspectives have become common, and Michals’s early photographs seem especially prescient.
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