{"title":"Diana Michener","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"diana-michener-twenty-eight-figure-studies-book-diana-michener-9783869308968","title":"Diana Michener: Twenty Eight Figure Studies","description":"How to represent sex as a place of ecstasy rather than pornography? How to transcend the unavoidable physicality of the sexual act, sometimes tender, sometimes violent, to reach what Diana Michener calls \"the place of communion ... the unknown, the cosmic\"? Michener initially considered depicting live models for this book, yet finally decided to photograph stills from pornographic films, transforming the hyperreality of the sex industry, its tarnished colored gloss, into something more ambiguous, timeless and expressive. The figurative forms of sex are often (just) recognizable in Michener's black-and-white pictures: a kiss, breasts, entangled limbs; but just as often they are not. Bodies are simplified and blurred, seeping into abstraction and darkness, hinting at yet never embracing explicitness. In images both graphic and impressionistic, Michener's self-declared goal steadfastly remains \"to transform into the visual what is emotional and mental.\"","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49741506937105,"sku":"NGR9783869308968","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/3869308966.jpg?v=1750999631"},{"product_id":"diana-michener-trance-book-diana-michener-9783958297579","title":"Diana Michener: Trance","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor many years Diana Michener desired to photograph the horizon, yet hesitated-how to capture this defining feature of the landscape that is strangely elusive, a line which marks where earth and sky only seem to meet? Then, two years ago, Michener took up an 8 × 10 analogue camera and felt drawn to the landscape outside Walla Walla, Washington, where she spends her summers. So began her engagement with the horizon, which she followed throughout mostly desert and semi-arid environments in Big Bend National Park, Texas, the Golan Heights, Israel, the Bardenas Reales, Spain, and beyond. Michener intuits the horizon in a trance-like state, grasping its many changing guises: as an elegant line drawn by the setting sun, dissolving into haze, all but obscured by majestic boulders, or merely implied in a close-up image of wave-like rock sediments.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eLandscape-horizon line-the moment sky meets land or water. Symbolically we stand confined or expanded by our relationship to this line.\u003c\/i\u003e Diana Michener\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51062784491793,"sku":"NIN9783958297579","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/3958297579.jpg?v=1771496384"},{"product_id":"diana-michener-song-of-life-book-diana-michener-9783958293267","title":"Diana Michener: Song of Life","description":"A Song of Life presents Diana Michener's most recent body of work, poignant photographs of animals that for the artist have become close to self-portraits. Michener began photographing animals unexpectedly during a trip to India in 2006 where, intimidated by the chaos of the street, she wandered into a zoo and turned her lens to its rhinoceros, elephants and gazelles. Haunted by the resulting images of confinement, Michener became increasingly obsessed with them and decided to expand the project, first at the menagerie at Paris' Jardin des Plants and later in various zoos throughout Europe and the USA. During her visit to each zoo, Michener remained silent and still for hours in front of the cages, almost in communion with these creatures who take on a close to mythical dignity in her photos.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51065207816465,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51065210142993,"sku":"NIN9783958293267","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/3958293263.jpg?v=1750871041"},{"product_id":"diana-michener-mirror-book-diana-michener-9783969990995","title":"Diana Michener: Mirror","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eI saw what I saw, and then, all particulars fell away and there was vastness and an immense eternity. - Diana Michener\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eMirror\u003c\/i\u003e is a sweeping retrospective of Diana Michener's photography, encapsulating her ongoing journey in the medium across the decades. In three volumes and over 600 images newly scanned from Michener's archive, \u003ci\u003eMirror\u003c\/i\u003e covers her work from 1975 to 2021 and includes many as yet unpublished images. Michener presents her oeuvre in lyrical chapters, each exploring a specific theme and including portraits (of friends, strangers, herself), landscapes, still lifes (of Greco-Roman sculpture, mannequins, bones), visual diaries of her travels, and re-enactments of myths such as Narcissus and Leda and the Swan. Short personal texts by the photographer open each chapter, taking us through her memories and giving insight into the images we would otherwise miss.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51065290948881,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51065292587281,"sku":"NIN9783969990995","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52111407776017,"sku":"NGR9783969990995","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/3969990998.jpg?v=1771501280"},{"product_id":"diana-michener-bones-book-diana-michener-9783969990124","title":"Diana Michener: Bones","description":"\u003cp\u003eFor Diana Michener, bones are treasures, and this book is her preservation of them through photography in a way that honors their value as vessels of lives past. Inspired by nineteenth-century photography, along with Paul Strand and Irving Penn, Michener chose the appropriately delicate and precious medium of platinum prints, which she crafted in her darkroom from analogue film shot on a Hasselblad 500 C camera. Bones recreates both the look and spirit of these prints through offset printing on Phoenixmotion Xantur paper, each image interspersed with glassine leaves to create the sense of an antique photographic album. Michener's subjects are both human and animal bones, photographed between 2018 and 2021 in collections including Luxembourg's Museum of Natural History, Strasbourg's Zoological Museum and the Musée de Cambrai-often in restricted areas, thus revealing many bones not normally accessible to the public. In her words: \"Bones bear witness to a life, and in and of themselves they show the magnificent structures of our forms. They are what is left.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eBones are a physical trace of a soul.\u003c\/i\u003e - Diana Michener\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52762483982609,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52762484441361,"sku":"NIN9783969990124","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9783969990124.jpg?v=1763600730"},{"product_id":"diana-michener-mortes-book-diana-michener-9783969991411","title":"Diana Michener: Mortes","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMortes\u003c\/i\u003e presents Diana Michener's reflections on the mystery of death. In three visual chapters focused on different themes, Michener explores her complex relationship to her subject: one of terror and wonder, of scientific fact and the inexplicable, of reverence and acceptance. The first chapter \"Heads\" shows the heads of cows slaughtered at an abattoir. Fascinated by the ambivalent relationship between the body and spirit, Michener records the intense moment of death. In \"Foetus\" she documents a collection of deformed nineteenth-century foetuses preserved in formaldehyde in glass jars, capturing what she calls \"a terrible beauty in their silence and stillness.\" In the final and most confronting chapter \"Corpus,\" Michener turns her lens upon us, photographing human corpses during autopsy. She touches on our unease with the brute physicality of death while conveying her admiration for the human body as a magnificent construct, as impressive in life as in death.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eI went to look, to see if I could see, though of course death is far too mysterious to encounter or embrace.\u003c\/i\u003e - Diana Michener\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52762485522705,"sku":"NIN9783969991411","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9783969991411.jpg?v=1763600732"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-diana-michener.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}