MICHAEL DWECK (born 1957)
Michael Dweck was born in Brooklyn, New York, and was given his first Kodak camera by his parents at age seven. After attending the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn, Dweck began a career in advertising. As creative director of international campaigns in various media, Dweck received over forty awards for his work including the Gold Lion at the Cannes Film Festival. Two of his long-form television pieces were acquired in to the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Dweck began his photographic career in 2002 by drawing inspiration from his teenage years spent by the beach on Long Island, and began photographing the surfing culture of Montauk, New York. His nostalgic chronicle of the hedonistic surf community was published in his 2004 book The End.
Dweck’s 2008 book, Mermaids, focused on the beauty of female nudes underwater. Many of the images were taken in the Weeki Wachee fishing village in Florida, whose residents have been raised since birth around water and many of whom are able to hold their breath underwater for as long as five minutes.
Dweck’s third and most recently published book, Habana Libre, is a contemporary exploration of a secretive social order within Cuba – the privileged creative class in a classless society. This body of work was exhibited in 2012 at the Fototeca Museum in Cuba, making him the first living American artist to have a solo museum exhibition in the country.
Michael Dweck photographs have appeared in magazines such as Vanity Fair, VOGUE Paris, Esquire, and Black+White, and have been exhibited in solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, and Tokyo.
In 2018, Dweck’s first feature length film The Last Race, a study of a Long Island race track and its community, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.