Diana Michener: Trance

For 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.

Landscape-horizon line-the moment sky meets land or water. Symbolically we stand confined or expanded by our relationship to this line. Diana Michener

“Known for her numerous black and white series examining the living - and the dead - in its many forms, the American photographer Diana Michener recently published at Steidl not one but two monographic works. A simultaneous dive into two apparently antagonistic series, exploring on one side the intimacy of bodies and on the other the immensity of nature.”

50 monochrome images, all rendered somehow equivalent by their scale (12.75 x 10 inches) and hypnotic attention to minute detail.--Barry Schwabsky "Border Crossings"
--Matthieu Jacquet "Numero"

Born in Boston in 1940, Diana Michener holds a Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College in New York and later studied with Lisette Model at New York's New School for Social Research. Michener has exhibited internationally, including her retrospective "Silence Me" at the Maison Européene de la Photographie in Paris in 2001. Her books with Steidl include the award-winning Dogs, Fires, Me (2005), 3 Poems (2006), Sweethearts (2009), Figure Studies (2011) and A Song of Life (2018).

The trancelike allure of the horizon, from Texas to Spain In this captivating project, Diana Michener (born 1940) photographs the horizon with an 8 x 10 camera across mostly desert and semi-arid environments in Big Bend National Park, Texas, the Golan Heights, Spain, and beyond. Michener intuits the horizon in a trance-like state, grasping its many changing guises.

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