Tag: duane michals

Duane Michals

Duane Michals, “Narcissus”, 1986, Photo Shoot, Model Unknown

Duane Michals was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, on February 18th, 1932. After taking art classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, he attended the University of Denver, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1953. In 1956 after his military service, Michals moved to New York where he studied at Parsons School of Design, later working as a graphic designer for magazines “Dance” and “Time”.

A 1958 Russian tour of portraiture photography started Michals’ artistic career. His photographs in the mid-1960s consisted of mainly deserted sites in New York. In 1966, Michals started to structure his photographs as multiframe compositions, with subjects enacting set narratives. The writing of captions in the margins of his photographs began in 1974 and, later in 1979 the incorporation of paint into his treatment of the printed images.

Duane Michals’s narrative pieces rely on the sequencing of multiple images to convey a sense of alienation and disequilibrium. In his world, the literal appearance of things is less important than the communication of a concept or story. In his portraiture, however, Michals relies wholly on his subjects’ appearance and self-chosen poses to establish their identity. He believes in a direct approach for his portraiture instead of his usual metaphoric approach.

Duane Michals

Photography by Duane Michals

Duane Michals is one of the great photographic innovators of the last century, widely known for his work with series, multiple exposures, and text.

Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his works. Rather than serving a didactic or explanatory function, his handwritten text adds another dimension to the images’ meaning and gives voice to Michals’s singular musings, which are poetic, tragic, and humorous, often all at once.

Over the past five decades, Michals’s work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, hosted Michals’s first solo exhibition (1970). More recently, he has had one-person shows at the Odakyu Museum, Tokyo (1999), and at the International Center of Photography, New York (2005). In 2008, Michals celebrated his 50th anniversary as a photographer with a retrospective exhibition at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Greece and the Scavi Scaligeri in Verona, Italy.