As Bottega Veneta unveils a new campaign by Duane Michals, the photographer tells us what dreams are made of
“Surrealism suggests an alternative profound reality,” artist and photographer Duane Michals tells AnOther. “It’s discomforting, and it contradicts the mere facts of our ordinary reality.” Michals’ latest work, What Are Dreams, a photo series and short film featuring Jacob Elordi in collaboration with Bottega Veneta draws on his long-standing engagement with surrealism, which dates back to the 1960s. The project premiered at Curzon Mayfair with Bottega Veneta and Club Ciné on November 3, ahead of a post-Halloween screening of Guillermo del Toro’s highly anticipated Frankenstein, in which Elordi stars.
Inspired by scuola metafisican Giorgio de Chirico and surrealist René Magritte, Michals is known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts, using irrational juxtapositions to provoke questions about the boundaries of reality and representation in nature.
His new short film was shot at his New York home, and captures Elordi in black and white with props and motifs that have appeared throughout Michals’ distinguished oeuvre – a convex mirror, a suspended feather, a crystal ball. Elordi recites a poem by Michals that shares its name with the project, and was first published in 2001 as part of Michals’ photo book Questions with Answers.
“In this chimera’s hallucination, the strange become the ordinary without surprise, and desire and terror thrive side by side,” says Elordi as a white feather dances before him. “In lucid dreams, the dreamer comes awake and sees that what he thought was real was fake.”
“Photography spills the beans and tells you the facts of what you see,” says Michals, whose interest in the medium began with photojournalism. He soon became intrigued by how toying with mediums through exposure, text, or serialising could manipulate the message. Subsequently, Michals began to use hand-written musings and poetry to add a further dimension to his images and film. “The language of poetry suggests another layer of mystery that is not visible,” he says. “I’m very much interested in the realm of the invisible. My problem is: how do I make the invisible visible?”
Dreams (”the midnight movies of the mind” as Michals describes them) are essential to his artistic process. ”They are the great mystery. We spend a third of our lives dreaming and we don’t even notice it,” he says. “Movie making is also a dream.”
What Are Dreams marks Michals’ second campaign for Bottega Veneta after his first in 1985. Elordi was appointed brand ambassador in 2024 – their collaboration here brings the house’s past and present together. “Jacob understood exactly what I was trying to do with the project,“ says Michals. ”He was right there for the magic and the mystery of it.”
