Who is Michael Jang

Los Angeles / Spain: Atelier Editions / SYL L'Art Grafic, 2019. First Edition. Hardcover. VG (Book appears unread). White cloth over boards with b&w photo-illustration and black lettering; white half-wrap on rear cover with black lettering; 255 pp.; richly illustrated + 20-page insert richly illustrated in color, in pocket at rear pastedown. Michael Jang spent nearly four decades working as a successful commercial portrait photographer. Unbeknown to the world, however, he was assembling a vast archive of thousands of remarkable images, authoring several now-iconic series: The Jangs (1973), Beverly Hilton (1973), San Francisco (1973-1987), Summer Weather (1983), College (1972-1973), Punks & Poets (1978-1980), and Garage Band (2001). Jang revealed nothing of that vast archive for almost 40 years until 2001, when he submitted a number of images for consideration to San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. His work attracted immediate acclaim, and for the past fifteen years he has revealed those images in a series of national and international exhibitions and books. The artist's first major monograph, Who Is Michael Jang?, introduced by long-time collaborator and SFMoMA curator emerita of photography, Sandra S. Phillips, offers readers an eagerly anticipated examination of Jang's truly idiosyncratic oeuvre -- Book Wrap.