From September 28 through November 4, 2006, Laurence Miller Gallery will present Michael Spano: Auto Portraits, a selection of 16 recent large-scale black-and-white photographs.

In this recent series, Spano, the quintessential New York photographer, has focused his lens on the ubiquitous car and truck drivers that dictate the pulse of New York ’s streets. Within vehicles named Liberty , Grand Cherokee, and Saturn, which draw attention to America ’s current obsession with bigness, Spano captures the intimate gestures and expressions of their occupants. With classic Spano virtuosity, each image is packed with details, word fragments, reflections and even fingerprints that take the viewer on a topsy-turvy journey through the contemporary urban landscape.

For over twenty years, this 57-year old native New Yorker has captured the unique energy and the vitality of New York while significantly adding to the vocabulary of street photography. Whether by employing a panoramic camera, an eight-lens multiple-exposure camera, or in this series a more traditional single-lens camera, Spano has enlarged our awareness of how a photograph can look and how the city can be captured.