Eros and Thanatos, published by Twin Palms Publishers in April 1993, gathers photographs and poems around two classic themes named in its title: love and death. Twin Palms describes it as the fourth book of Michals’s work and as perhaps the most revealing and overtly sensual of his books to date. The images and poems conjure memories of love and loss, lust and longing.

The book is large in format and modest in extent: hardcover, 11 x 15 inches, 64 pages, with 43 black-and-white gravure plates. Twin Palms states that the plates are sheet-fed gravures, a specific choice in the physical presentation of these photographs. The inclusion of both photographs and poems offers two ways of approaching the themes, giving a reader an opportunity to consider what words and images can each make present.

For the reader, the interest lies in the whole construction rather than in any single plate. The pairing of image and poem, the gravure printing, and the oversize format make it a considered object as much as a monograph. Love and death provide a broad frame, but memory gives these subjects a personal dimension. Reading a photograph beside a poem can draw attention to the difference between an experience and its later recollection.

Twin Palms has issued several books of Michals’s work, and Eros and Thanatos is the fourth. Its combination of images and text, together with its printing and scale, invites reading across pages rather than scanning individual pictures. The publisher’s own description frames it as a particularly revealing and sensual entry in a sustained body of work.