Bones

For 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 nineteenthcentury 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."

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), A Song of Life (2018), Trance (2020) and Twenty-eight Figure Studies (2020).