{"product_id":"duane-michals-portrait-richard-gere-awake-asleep-fotofolio-new-york-1979","title":"DUANE MICHALS, Portrait of Richard Gere Awake \u0026 Asleep, Fotofolio, New York, 1979","description":"\u003cp\u003eFotofolio postcard, New York, n.d. [after 1979]. Card ref. Z288. ©Duane Michals, courtesy Sidney Janis Gallery, New York. Approx. 10.5 × 15 cm. Offset-printed colour postcard, unused. Verso credits image, photographer, gallery and publisher; no printing date given for the card itself, catalogued here by the photograph's date. Condition: excellent. Clean corners, no writing or postal use, minor handling to edges consistent with storage.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 1979, Richard Gere was two years past \u003cem\u003eLooking for Mr. Goodbar\u003c\/em\u003e, one year from \u003cem\u003eAmerican Gigolo\u003c\/em\u003e — the role that would fix him for a decade as American cinema's defining male object of desire. Duane Michals photographed him that year, and refused the assignment implicit in that moment. Rather than deliver a clean star portrait at the threshold of stardom, Michals fractures Gere three times over through a mirrored reflection, then sets that multiplied, alert face against something else entirely: an oversized, sleeping head, reworked in applied paint until photograph and painting can no longer be told apart.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis wasn't incidental to Michals's practice — it was the practice. Since the late 1960s he had been building a body of work that treated the photograph as an unreliable witness rather than a transparent record: double exposures standing in for the human spirit leaving the body, hand-applied text turning single images into fragments of a larger, invented narrative, paint laid directly over gelatin silver prints until the photographic and the painted could no longer be separated. \u003cem\u003eAwake \u0026amp; Asleep\u003c\/em\u003e runs that same operation on a face already destined for mass circulation. Reflection multiplies the visible Gere without producing more certainty about him; the sleeping Gere, the one supposedly closest to something private, is the one most thoroughly mediated — painted, enlarged, least photographic of the two.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe postcard adds its own afterlife to that argument. Gere's interest in photography intensified in exactly this period, driven by his friendship with Herb Ritts before Ritts had even begun his own career; the two would attend photography auctions together in Los Angeles for a few hundred dollars a print. That interest matured over four decades into a serious personal collection substantial enough that Christie's devoted a dedicated 139-lot sale to it in 2022, realising $2,422,350 in total. Duane Michals was in that collection — Lot 120, a Michals work, sold for $12,600. The photographer who fractured Gere's face in 1979 became, decades later, an artist Gere personally collected. Subject becomes collector of the artist who once made him the subject.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFotofolio, founded in New York in 1975, published the history of photography in postcard form, working directly with photographers, estates and galleries and distributing results through museum shops. A mixed-media artwork becomes a gallery image, becomes a photographic reproduction, becomes a postcard, becomes a small object that keeps travelling long after the exhibition it documented has closed.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Fotofolio","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54556770632018,"sku":"TNR-2026-0650","price":55.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Michals_Duane.Artistpostcard_portraitofRichardGere.jpg?v=1788673063","url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/products\/duane-michals-portrait-richard-gere-awake-asleep-fotofolio-new-york-1979","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}