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 by the French New Wave and experimental cinema, most notably Jean-Luc Godard and Andy Warhol. In 1969, Auder met and eventually married Viva, an actress who started her career collaborating with Warhol. 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. Viva first used these collaborative tapes to create the first video novel The Baby published in 1975. 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. As the quality of video cameras improved and access to editing facilities increased, Auder’s skills as an auteur became more apparent.
Auder married painter/actress and author Viva in 1969 and together they had one daughter, Alexandra Auder, in February 1971. This event is included in the couple's film diaries.
Auder was married to Cindy Sherman from the early 1980s until the late 1990s.
Auder is currently represented by Office Baroque in Brussels, Belgium, Martos Gallery in New York, Galleria Fonti in Naples, Italy and Aurel Scheibler in Berlin, Germany.

Selected works