A self-taught photographer, Duane Michals has redefined photography by exploring the possibilities of the medium without regard to its rules, always seeking expression and imagination rather than adherence to specific, traditional forms. Michals is best known for his narrative sequences, which play with the cinematic aspect of photography. He has written, ”I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see… (Real Dreams, Addison House, 1976). Like graphic puzzles, his ”photostories” symbolise intangible realities. His career as a photographer is unusual, with equal success in the commercial and fine art fields.
Raised in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, where he was born in 1932 to a working-class family, Michals spent much time with his Slovakian grandmother, who lived with his family. He credits her with his later development of an alter ego, Stefan Mihal, whose life Michals might have led, complete with suburban home, factory job and middle-class family. During high school, he became interested in art and began taking weekend watercolour classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and then at Carnegie-Mellon University. A scholarship enabled Michals to attend the University of Denver, where he earned a B.A. in art in 1953. Shortly after graduation, he was drafted into the United States Army and served as a second lieutenant in Germany during the Korean War. In 1956, after completing his military service, Michals decided to study graphic design at the Parsons School of Design. After a year, he left to work as a graphic designer/assistant art director at Dance magazine.
Within a year, in 1958, he had accepted a position in the advertising department of Time, Inc. as a typographer and designer. That same year, on a three-week trip to Russia, Michals first became interested in photography, taking snapshots and portraits of Russian people with a borrowed camera. Upon his return to the United States, he saw the greater potential of his Russian portraits and began to move into commercial photography, with steady success. His first group exhibition, which included the work of Garry Winogrand, was held at the Image Gallery in New York in 1959. From his first commercial assignment, creating publicity stills for the Broadway musical revue The Fantasticks, Michals soon found steady work as a freelance photographer for magazines as diverse as Esquire, Mademoiselle, Show, Vogue, The New York Times, Horizon and Scientific American.
Then, in 1964, Michals began a personal project of photographing the empty, uninhabited spaces of the city, seeing their stage-like implications. In 1966, frustrated by the weaknesses of the camera and the rules of what photography should be, he began to make photographic sequences of 5 to 15 images. Like all his ‘photo-stories’, each preconceived and staged sequence in natural light is simple and logical, yet seemingly illusory. These narrative tableaux anticipate the fictional strategies popular with the postmodern artists of the 1980s.
Derived from his belief that ‘what I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see’, Michal’s early sequences, such as The Spirit Leaves the Body (1968), Fallen Angel (1968) and Chance Meeting (1969), build narrative while heightening the psychological tenor. Each three-quarter by five-inch image is masterfully emotionally psychological, sexually provocative and elusive in its realistic depiction. Influenced by the fusion of reality and unreality in the surrealist paintings of Rene Magritte and the haunting pittura metafisica of Giorgio de Chirico, as well as the documentary tradition of photography, Michals has developed a style of telling unsolved graphic puzzles in tableau form.
Fuzzy focus, double exposure, blur and other imperfections of the photographic process enhance the immediacy of each scene. Thematically, Duane Michals’ photographs dwell on his obsession with love and death. The place of dreams, the unconscious and spiritual desires become the subject of his camera as the intangible becomes material. The strength of Michals’ vision lies in his acknowledgement of our spiritual longings and desires.
An early interest in verse and the works of Walt Whitman led Michals to begin writing poetry in 1972. In 1974, Michals began writing on his photographs, subverting the viewer’s literal expectations.
The touch of the hand is visible. Mistakes are included, leaving an impression of chance and authenticity. One of his best-known images, ”A Letter from My Father”, is a photograph taken in 1960 but reprinted in 1975, the year his father died, with Michal’s handwritten thoughts. Poignant and private, the poetic handwritten text tells of an unfulfilled promise, adding a dimension distinctly different from the visual.
Michals continued to push the boundaries of photography. In 1975, in Failed Attempt to Photograph Reality, Michals eliminated photography altogether by writing on a piece of paper, among other things, the words ‘…To photograph reality is to photograph nothing’. Then, in 1978, anticipating the hybrid conceptualism of the postmodernists, Michals began to paint on his own photographs. In Ceci n’est pas une photo d’une Pipe (1978), a reference to Magritte, Michals sought to show the inevitable limitations of the single photograph. In the late 1970s, Michals began to make more overt references to his homosexuality. In his books Homage to Cavafy (1978) and The Nature of Desire (1986), his ideas about normality as culturally defined, beauty within both sexes and the legitimacy of affection between the sexes come through in the eloquent openness of his words and images.
Working simultaneously in both commercial and fine art photography, Michals has managed to bridge the historical friction between the two, seeing the mutual possibilities and exchange of ideas long before fashion photography was accepted as art in the 1990s. He sees no division and does his commercial work alongside his fine art photography. He prefers real, naturally lit locations, but disdains the studio and darkroom, and all his work contains a lyrical element, as exemplified by his album cover, Synchronicity, for the musical group The Police. His commercial success has given him the financial means to pursue his personal fine art work.
Since 1964, Michals has been represented in major solo exhibitions around the world, and his photographs can be found in museum and private collections internationally. More than 20 books of his images have been published, beginning with Sequences in 1970. The Essential Duane Michals (1997), a compilation of his ongoing photographic career, includes both his commercial and fine art photography.
