Michael Dweck

Recently, Dweck has revisited themes from his first two bodies of work, The End and Mermaids, to create customized surfboards emblazoned with black-and-white silhouette images of mermaids. Dweck describes himself as a casual surfer, and the boards are ridable as well as works of art. The surfboards measure six feet and six inches in length and are handcrafted in California, where silk-screen prints of Dweck's photographs are coated with fiberglass and high-gloss resin to create what ArtDaily describes as “beautiful, handmade surfboard-shaped sculptures that seamlessly merge Dweck’s subject and medium.” They are named after figures who have influenced Dweck's career, such as Harold "Doc" Edgerton, who developed techniques for underwater flash photography used extensively in Mermaids, and Duke Kahanamoku who is widely credited with popularizing the sport of surfing. ArtDaily quotes Dweck saying of his surfboards:

On March 5th, the 10,818th Walmart broke ground in the town of Riverhead NY. No big deal, right? You drive along just about any road in America and soon enough you are bound to hit one, and if not a Walmart, it’ll be any of the other big box stores that have come to define 21st century American architecture. Interchangeable concrete boxes with corporate logos tacked on front. They are all the same, and maybe that’s the idea.

Originally tempted to accompany the racing scenes with rock music, Dweck was instead drawn to classical music including the Dies Irae of Mozart's Requiem Mass in D minor. Dweck said that he used the classical music playing on his headphones to guide the composition of many of the shots. For the remainder of the soundtrack, Dweck set up microphones around the raceway and in the cars themselves to sample over 4,000 sounds ranging from revving engines and tools being dropped to telephones being answered in the office. Sound engineer Peter Albrechtsen was paired with composer Robert Goula to create what No Film School's Oakley Andersen-Moore describes as "a half-music, half-machine sound design" in which the sounds of the track and original music transition seamlessly into one another to create what Dweck characterizes as a "distinct audio language," saying, "I don’t want the audience to necessarily know where the music stops and starts or where the sound design stops and starts."

Dweck's first feature-length film, "The Last Race," premiered on January 22, 2018 in the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where it was billed as "A cinematic portrait of a small town stock car track and the tribe of drivers that call it home as they struggle to hold onto an American racing tradition." Produced and directed by Dweck under the working title "Blunderbust", it explores and documents the culture of amateur stock car drivers at the Riverhead Raceway in Riverhead, New York and laments the impending destruction of the raceway, the last of what were once 40 on Long Island, at the hands of "big-box" stores.

To film the race scenes, cameras were placed at numerous locations around the racecourse as well as on and in the cars themselves. Interviewed by film writer Chris O'Fait for IndieWire about his choice of equipment, Dweck explained that he'd used a Canon EOS C300 camera in order to capture "a warm sunlight look that was reminiscent of iconic auto racing films like ‘Days of Thunder’ and the golden glow of 1970s surf photography similar to my earlier photography works," primarily with the Canon L lens due to its compactness and practicality. Vintage lenses by Arri and Zeiss were also employed, as was a Sony F5 camera. For car-mounted cameras which might be damaged by collisions, the smaller and more replaceable Canon EOS 5D Mark III and GoPro were used.

The Last Race was among the nominees for Sundance's Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary, with a panel of film critics assembled by IndieWire voting it one of the best documentaries of the festival. In April 2018, The Last Race was shown for a second time at the Florida Film Festival in Maitland, Florida, where it won the festival's Special Jury Award for Artistic Vision.

On March 27, 2018, Magnolia Pictures acquired the rights to distribute The Last Race in the United States, with release planned for later in the year.

From September 2017 to March 2018, Dweck's work from Habana Libre appeared in Cuba IS, a multimedia exhibit exploring life in modern Cuba, at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Century City. Los Angeles. Backed by the Getty Foundation's "Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA" initiative, the exhibit included an original documentary film produced by the Annenberg Foundation which follows Dweck's and four other featured photographers' work in Cuba.

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.

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.

On November 6, 2015 at Phillip's London, Dweck's surfboard The Duke's Mermaid (Sapphire) sold for a world record of $57,000, ranking in the top ten lots for the auction. Another was auctioned in a benefit for Southampton Hospital

In late January 2014, selections from Habana Libre were exhibited at Art Palm Beach in West Palm Beach, Florida, with photographer and critic Elin Spring characterizing Dweck's black and white gelatin silver prints as “positively electric.”

Telling his wife the film would be finished in a month, Dweck spent five years shooting 370 hours of footage, which would ultimately be edited into 74 minutes. By 2014, Dweck had completed the first version of the film under the title Blunderbust. The Independent Filmmaker Project, describing it as “the story of a small town American racetrack fighting for survival when land hungry corporations come to town,” selected Blunderbust for inclusion in its 2014 Spotlight on Documentaries. This version, nearly three hours long, was centered around a storyline in the manner of a conventional film, with dramatically timed conflict and scenes selected to support the story. Dweck was dissatisfied with the result, saying,"So I went back and I looked at all my footage again. I'd say most of everything I loved wasn't in there because it didn't fit that story." He then spent the next few years, including three and a half months in Denmark, re-editing nineteen hours of source footage to create a substantially different work.

Starting February 24 and running through March 24, 2012, Habana Libre was exhibited in Havana's Fototeca de Cuba museum, making Dweck the first American contemporary artist to mount a solo exhibition in Cuba since the US embargo on that country began. Expecting around 300 guests, upon his arrival Dweck instead found himself greeted by around 2,000 artists, diplomats and journalists waiting to enter the exhibit. Later that evening, Alex Castro and Camilo Guevara headed upstairs under armed guard to view their own images as Dweck had captured them. Another of Fidel Castro's sons, Alejandro Castro, was to quip, "Thanks for making me famous"

In July 2011, it was reported that Kanye West's video director Hype Williams had scouted Montauk as a possible site for a music video. Williams was seen with Dweck's book, looking for the locations featured in it.

New York's Staley-Wise Gallery opened an exhibit of Dweck's work to date, Habana Libre and The End: Montauk, N.Y., to coincide with the release of the Habana Libre book on December 9, 2011. Dweck drew parallels between elite Havana and Montauk, observing, "Here are two worldly paradises, both built-up in the 50s and preserved since – for better or worse; both populated by insular groups in some kind of isolation, whether it's self or externally imposed; both beset by threats from without and by new hierarchies from within." Dweck's exhibit at Staley-Wise ran through late January 2012.

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.

Upon Dweck's first visit to Havana in 2009, the New York Times' Guy Trebay quotes Dweck recalling, "I expected all the crumbling buildings and used cars, the usual clichés." Instead, on the very first night of his stay, he was invited to a party where he was introduced to a farándula, or social circle, of Cuba's idle elites, the members of which had access to expensive gadgets such as iPhones and regularly held cocktail parties and staged fashion shows.

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.”

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.

The Last Race began in 2007 as a photography project. Riverhead Raceway reminded Dweck of a stock car track near his childhood home in Bellmore, where on Saturday nights he would sneak under the fence to watch the races. Dweck spent several years shooting still photographs of the race cars with an 8" x 10" camera and acquainting hmself with the racing community. As Dweck recounts, "I cut the cars apart, I sandblasted them, I photographed the components and then I realized that motion and the emotion of that place were more than still photography alone could capture. It needed to be told through film." "Over that time," he said, "I created a film in my head. I had a story; I had characters, I knew how they would act, the paths that their lives would take, and the images that they would be a part of."

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."

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.

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."

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.

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.

For decades, Montauk had been undergoing a gradual trasmformation 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. Wrting 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."

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 plot revolves around a couple in their 1980s, Barbara and Jim Cromarty, who have owned and operated Riverhead Raceway since 1977. With the rise in property values due to development, the Cromartys are offered over $10 million to sell the raceway, the last of its kind on Long Island, which would be replaced by a multiplex movie theater, but refuse to sell it. To sell the track, as the Florida Film Festival explains it, would "cast adrift the extended tribe of adrenaline-junky drivers, fans, and families, all inexorably linked to the asphalt oval where blue-collar glory still triumphs over white-collar profit." The Hollywood Reporter's Justin Lowe observes that the film "represents more of a living document of a dwindling American subculture than a typical sports documentary" in which Dweck "explore[s] themes of masculine identity and class representation that underlie stock car racing," with Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com characterizing the track and its racers as "nutshells of Americana, testosterone and nostalgia."

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.

Michael Dweck (born September 26, 1957) 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. (2004,) Mermaids (2008,) and Habana Libre (2011.) 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.

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.