Penumbra Foundation is pleased to present The Puppet Master, a solo exhibition by Diana Michener.

In The Puppet Master, Michener explores the relationship between a daughter and her father. “The idea led to the creation of a puppet show,” Michener says. “The daughter became the puppet and the father, the puppeteer. They worked together in silence. They did what they wanted. It was a mysterious encounter. They had something in mind, so did I.”

These enigmatic images, prompt the viewer to consider the forces that shape human connections. “Photography lends itself to open narrative,” Michener reflects. “It might not be my specific story you see, but your own, which excites me.”

Diana Michener (b. 1940, Boston) is a photographer and artist based in Paris (France) and Walla Walla (Washington). After receiving a Bachelor of Arts from Barnard College in New York, she studied with Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research.

Michener has exhibited internationally, including her 2001 retrospective Silence Me at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, as well as presentations of Morning After Morning at the Photo Museum of Ireland (2001), Dogs, Fires, Me at Pace/MacGill in New York (2005), Figure Studies at Nature Morte in Berlin (2010), and “Anima, Animals” at Maison Européenne de la Photographie  (2016–2017). Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Michener’s numerous publications include Silence Me (Maison Européenne de la Photographie, 2001), Dogs, Fires, Me (Steidl, 2005), 3 Poems (Steidl, 2006), Sweethearts (Steidl, 2009), Figure Studies (Steidl, 2011), A Song of Life (Steidl, 2018), Trance (Steidl, 2020), Twenty-eight Figure Studies (Steidl, 2020), Bones (Steidl, 2022), Mortes (Steidl, 2023), and Mirror (Steidl, 2024).