Michel Auder

Who is Michel Auder?

Michel Auder is a French photographer and filmmaker. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

He began making films at the age of 18. He was influenced of the French New Wave and experimental cinema, most notably Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Warhol. In 1969, Auder met and eventually married Viva, one of Warhol’s principal talents. A year later, they moved to New York City where Auder has since resided. That same year, he purchased a Sony Portapak, one of the first commercially available video cameras.

Video allowed Auder to translate Warhol’s talent for making the banal glamorous and the glamorous banal into a diary practice which Auder himself did not consider fine art. His earliest works are travel logs and endearing portraits of friends including Hannah Wilke, Alice Neel, Annie Sprinkle, Eric Bogosian, Louis Waldon, and Larry Rivers. The label “video artist” was applied retroactively when Auder began exhibiting his work in 1980. At that time, he produced a series of works including scripted biographical material and video collages appropriating material from television.