Duane Michals: Foto Follies: How Photography Lost its Virginity on the Way to the Bank

📕 Of this satirical look at contemporary photography, Duane Michals has said, "The more serious you are, the sillier you have to be. I have a great capacity for foolishness. It's essential." Whether parodying Wolfgang Tillmans or Andres Serrano, Sherrie Levine (A Duane Michals Photograph of a Sherrie Levine Photograph of a Walker Evans Photograph) or Cindy Sherman (Who is Sydney Sherman?), Michals uses his ferocious wit and keen eye to create images at once humorous and penetrating. As The New York Times described Gursky's Gherkin, the work "explores as never before the sense of picklehood, or what it means to be a pickle." The Times also testified that "this high-humored sendup of arty photography should be required viewing for all art-world heavies, particularly critics, curators and collectors." Michals takes aim at pretensions that are often perceived as deliberately obscuring contemporary art, and in doing so he exemplifies his mastery of both the visual world and the written word, while providing the elemental pleasure of a good laugh.