Michael Dweck

Michael Dweck is an American visual artist and filmmaker. Best known for his narrative photography, Dweck's work "explores ongoing struggles between identity and adaptation in endangered societal enclaves." In 2003, he became the first living photographer to have a solo exhibition at Sotheby's, and in 2012, he was the first American photographer to exhibit his work in Cuba since the beginning of the United States embargo in 1960.
He lives and works in New York City and in Montauk, New York.
Born in 1957 in Brooklyn, Dweck grew up in Bellmore, Long Island, attending John F. Kennedy High School and then Brooklyn's Pratt Institute to study architecture, communication and fine arts. Upon graduation, Dweck founded Michael Dweck & Co., later known as Dweck & Campbell, winning a number of advertising industry awards before closing the firm in 2001 to pursue his artistic interests. Over the next decade, Dweck built a substantial reputation in fine art photography with works including The End: Montauk, N.Y. ''Mermaids and Habana Libre In recent years Dweck's artwork has branched into other media including sculpture and filmmaking, with his first feature-length film The Last Race'' premiering at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

Early life and education

Dweck was born in Brooklyn in 1957 to David and Sydelle Dweck. The family moved to Bellmore, a town on Long Island about 27 miles east of Manhattan, where David worked as accountant. Dweck's father presented him with his first camera on the occasion of the 1964 New York World's Fair.
Dweck graduated from Bellmore's John F. Kennedy High School in 1975. He then attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Initially an architecture student, Dweck switched to communication and fine arts in 1976 at the suggestion of the department, who told him that humor had no place in architecture after he chose to design a house for Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken for a school project. For another project, he designed an AT&T building to resemble a gigantic phone booth. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1979, he went on to study with artist James Wines and with semiotician Marshall Blonsky at The New School for Social Research.

Dweck & Campbell

While studying at the Pratt Institute, Dweck was exposed to the creative workings of several prominent New York-based advertising agencies, including DDB and Young & Rubicam. Following graduation, seeking to escape the frustration of what he considered to be an uninspirational creative environment, Dweck set out in 1980 to found his own firm, Michael Dweck & Co. In 1992, Lori Campbell joined the firm as a partner to form Dweck & Campbell.
The team quickly earned a reputation for edgy and unconventional work with a mischievous sense of humor. CNN called Dweck a “creative prodigy.” AdWeek's Tim Nudd dubbed him "a master of the absurd." Producer Larry Shanet, who contributed to many of the agency's television commercials and went on to win numerous industry awards, said of Dweck, "He's not a cookie-cutter guy, and he doesn't make cookie-cutter work." Well-known clients included MTV, Swatch, Comedy Central and Dial-a-Mattress.
Dweck & Campbell's second television advertisement, promoting retailer Giant Carpet, depicted George H. W. Bush during the waning days of his administration vandalizing the White House carpets for then-incoming president Bill Clinton. Clinton's communications director George Stephanopoulos telephoned Dweck to complain that he had "stag the mock killing of a president-elect." Under political pressure, network ABC withdrew the ad, but the agency managed to land five slots on NBC's popular late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live. "We knew we'd hit a home run," Dweck said. Over the next eighteen months, Giant Carpet expanded its operations from four stores to 42.
Still better known was the agency's 1998 television spot for Dial-a-Mattress, which featured a cantankerous man-sized Arctic ground squirrel purchasing a mattress on which to hibernate for the winter. The ad, noted for its comic abrasiveness, was pulled from the airwaves after only 13 days. It then went on to win a Gold Lion award at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, and was selected for inclusion in both the Gale Group's 100 most influential marketing campaigns of the year and Boards magazine's Top 10 Boards awards of 1999.
In April 1999, Lori Campbell left the firm, which was renamed Dweck, Inc., or more simply "Dweck!", with Dweck as chairman and sole creative director. The agency continued to pursue its unorthodox aesthetic sensibilities, and by seventeen months after Campbell's departure had more than doubled its previous year's billings to $50 million. Nearly immediately following the reorganization, Dweck! won the American Association of Advertising Agencies' O'Toole Creative Award for best small agency in the United States. Later in 1999, Dweck!'s spots for Top Driver driving school and UPN won awards from
Art Directors Club, Association of Independent Commercial Producers, One Club for Art & Copy and the New York Addys. Bennett Miller, later best known as the Academy Award-winning director of Capote, helped create Dweck!'s spots for Top Driver, in which hidden cameras recorded conversations between instructors and students. These spots were recognized as the Best Low-Budget Campaign by London International Advertising Awards.
In July 2001, Dweck closed the agency and left advertising to concentrate on photography. "I'm a creative," said Dweck, "and I want to get back to working just on creative."

Visual artist

''The End: Montauk, N.Y.''

After closing his advertising agency, in 2002 Dweck began to photograph subjects and scenes around Montauk, focusing on its surfing subculture. Dweck had been visiting Montauk since his second year of high school, beginning when he'd heard that the Rolling Stones were spending time there with Andy Warhol. Instead of finding the Rolling Stones, Dweck and his friends discovered a hidden inlet with a thriving local surfing culture.
Dweck would parlay this collection of art photos into the 2003 solo show at Sotheby's in New York and in 2004 his first book, The End: Montauk, N.Y., published by Harry N. Abrams. The 5,000-print run was sold out in less than three weeks. The brisk sell-out of the book was attributed to its local interest, the beauty of the photography, and the allure of the nude models. Artnet describes The End as a blend of nostalgia, documentary and fantasy, with photos that evoke "the paradise of summer, youth, and erotic possibility, and of community and camaraderie in a perfect setting."
For decades, Montauk had been undergoing a gradual transformation from a fishing village to a beachside resort. By the 1990s, developers, running out of room in the greater New York region, had begun to focus on the far eastern reaches of Long Island. Writing for Forbes, art critic Patrick Hanlon called The End an "act of preservation," later likening it to "an attempt to freeze time." Hanlon quoted Dweck saying, "I knew Montauk would change, and I wanted to capture the way Montauk made me feel. I didn't want it to be sentimental or nostalgic. I wanted that collection of images to freeze Montauk."
The best known photograph from the book, Sonya, Poles, depicts a naked young woman running across the beach towards the ocean with a surfboard under her arm. Hanlon compared Sonya to "Matisse at the beach.” One print of this photo sold for over $17,000, and then another sold for $30,000. Esquire Magazine dubbed the image "best surfboard" in its monthly cultural round-up.
In March 2010, Dweck filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a New York-based clothing designer called Malibu Denim, alleging that they'd used Sonya, Poles in their advertisements for designer jeans, even including copies of the photo on the hang tag which accompanied their products. With the jeans selling at $160–200 each, the court awarded Dweck $100,000.
Many of the photos from The End were exhibited at numerous galleries and solo exhibitions in New York, Belgium, San Francisco, Monaco, and the Blitz Gallery in Tokyo, and the Gallery Orchard in Nagoya. Dweck's work was also presented at art fairs in Paris and Bologna.
Dweck worried that his photographs would call more unwanted attention to the quiet culture of Montauk, saying:

"That's the way it always goes, isn't it? Everyone who makes it to the fallout shelter tries to bolt the door behind him. It's like some graffiti I read in the stall at the Shagwong Tavern. 'Welcome to Montauk. Take a picture and get the f--- out.'"
"Here are my pictures. Please, please stay away just a little longer."

A second edition of The End: Montauk, N.Y. was scheduled for release in July 2016 by Ditch Plains Press on a short run with a very limited distribution. It was projected that only 300 copies were to circulate, at a price of $3,000 each, with each copy numbered and signed by Dweck, printed on paper made in Italy's Riva del Garda and "enclosed in a handmade Japanese box." This limited edition is said to include 85 photographs which were not presented in the first edition.

''Mermaids''

Dweck's second book Mermaids was released in 2008 by Ditch Plains Press. Its photographs featured female nudes swimming under water, evoking the legend of the mermaid. As art editor Christopher Sweet described them in his introduction to the book, “Whether diving in the blue refractions of a swimming pool or suspended like a seraph in the cool, pellucid depths of a spring or emerging tentatively onto a rocky shore, Michael Dweck's mermaids are lovely and aloof and bare of all raiment but for their beautiful manes and the elemental draperies that surround them. Water, light, and lens converge to capture in modern guise the elusive creature of myth.”
Like his previous book, The End: Montauk, N.Y., Mermaids was inspired by Dweck's experiences interacting with the local environment. While night fishing in the waters off Long Island's south shore, Dweck was captivated by the flashing streaks of light caused by fish swimming beneath him. "The idea was, if I happen to fall overboard one night, what would I see down there? Those flashes of light could be mermaids."
Mermaids continued the focus on attractive young people in water settings which characterized The End, but departed from The Ends romantic realism to veer into fantasy, with photographs blurring the lines between reality and imagination.
Unlike The End, Mermaids was shot in and through the water, using methods for underwater flash photography developed by Harold Eugene Edgerton. The technology required to house and protect large format cameras was not yet widely available, leading Dweck to design his own cases for the project, using weights and pulleys to manipulate the camera. To obtain the desired angles for the shots, Dweck used two different techniques, diving into the water with his subjects, either with a long snorkel or unaided, and shooting from behind a glass wall placed within the river. As Dweck explained it:

I just started to experiment. I said to myself, "OK, I have light, I have a lens and I have water"

Rather than use professional models, Dweck turned to women with the experience needed to move comfortably and naturally in underwater environments, including friends from his native Long Island's East End as well as residents of the rural fishing village Aripeka, Florida. Shooting took place both locally in Montauk and Amagansett and in the Weeki Wachee River, where some inhabitants of Aripeka, located on a nearby island in the Gulf of Mexico, had been employed to perform at the Weeki Wachee Springs waterpark while costumed as mermaids.
According to Christopher Sweet, Dweck met a performer who had been raised in Aripeka and had spent her life in and around water, who then introduced him to other local girls, “some of whom could hold their breath underwater for as long as five or six minutes.”
Photographs from Mermaids were exhibited at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, London, Belgium and Hamburg. Playboy France featured selections in its October 2008 edition under the title "Le Bal des Sirènes."
One gelatin silver print from the collection entitled "Mermaid 1" sold at auction in 2009 at Christie's in London for over $17,000, well over initial estimates. In May 2015, Dweck's "Mermaid 18" sold for £27,500 at Phillips London,
over double the initial estimate.
For West Palm Beach's Canvas art fair in November 2015, Dweck mounted several murals near the Nicole Henry Fine Art gallery. These murals featured oversized prints of Dweck's mermaids swimming away from the viewer into a black background.
On November 17, 2015, Elin Nordegren held a dinner in Dweck's honor at her beachfront home in North Palm Beach, Florida, with guests including Chris Cline and Laura Norman, both of whom, like Nordegren, are avid collectors of Dweck's work. Dishes prepared by her personal chef were based upon themes drawn from both Mermaids and Dweck's earlier work, The End: Montauk, NY.