Maker of Enigmatic Images Dies at 94

Duane Michals, one of the 20th century’s most important photographers, known for making sequences of images that conveyed enigmatic narratives and defied the conventions of the medium, died on Tuesday, June 9, at 94, in a Manhattan hospital. The news was confirmed by DC Moore Gallery, which had represented him since 2013.

“A person of immeasurable intellect, charm, wit and kindness, Duane always questioned the many paths of the human condition and through his art pointedly captured what is not always readily seen nor spoken,” DC Moore director Edward De Luca told ARTnews in an email. “His six decades of art making, including the most recent short films he posted on the internet, have proven Duane’s message to be both universal and timeless.”

If an image could be worth a thousand words, Michals proved that a series of his photographs could be worth a thousand stories. In turning to the medium of photography, he showed that a single image could never be enough to say it all. Instead, Michals paired together multiple photographs—sometimes five or six to as many as nine—that unfolded like short narratives. “My photographs are about questions. They are not about answers,” Michals told BOMB magazine in 1987.

The first of these would form the basis of his first photography book, Sequences, which would establish the style for which Michals would become best known. The five-part Death Comes to the Old Lady (1969), for example, features an old woman, Michals’s grandmother, sitting in a wooden chair. As the sequence proceeds, we see the figure of a man in a suit, played by the artist’s father, enter the frame before seemingly snatching the woman, who disappears in a blur.

The Spirit Leaves the Body (1968) similarly shows a nude man lying on a bed. His spectral like figure seems to rise from the corpse, approaching the camera’s lens before vanishing. In Sequences, the specter of death looms large, the space between life and death, Michals would suggest wasn’t all the separate but perhaps a never-ending cycle. The cyclic nature of life and even time would play out across Michals’s oeuvre in the decades to come.

“Typically called a photographer because his preferred tool for expression is a camera, he has little in common with the majority of those who proudly define themselves with that appellation,” curator Linda Benedict-Jones wrote in the 2014 catalog for his Carnegie Museum of Art retrospective. “Michals does not attempt to capture the outside world, the life in front of the lens, but instead prefers to address, and then stage and record on film, the corners of his mind.”

As his practice evolved, Michals would continue to question the cycles of life and time, creating sequences that often have a wry sense of humor and surrealist bent to them. His nine-part Things Are Queer (1973) is emblematic of this approach. The first image shows an image of bathroom with an image hanging above the sink. The next shows a man’s larger-than-life foot in front of the sink. The third image zooms out showing this bathroom is a miniature and man has planted his foot into the tableau. The fourth image shows this to be a reproduction in a book, which in the fourth image shows a man reading it. As the series continues to zoom, out we see the man in a dark alleyway, which is itself a photograph. The final image makes it clear that this photograph of the man reading the book is in fact the photograph that hangs above the screen, a reproduction of a reproduction ad infinitum in a way.

Michals would often scrawl the work’s title on the image. He attributed this artistic decision to being self-taught. “When I came on the scene I knew nothing about photography,” he once said. “I never went to a photograph school, which was my saving grace. I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to write on a photograph, and I didn’t have to unlearn all the rules that school teach you.”

Michals would continue this approach in even more complex ways, adding more text and creating images that seemed to repeat endlessly. A Story About a Story (1989), for example, shows a young man holding his chin, as if seen via the endless images produced when two mirrors face each other.

Below the image, Michals gives context to the scene, while at the same time upending any logic that might be gleaned from it, writing, “This is a story about a man telling a story about a man who is telling a story. He sits in front of a mirror and tells his tale to the man in the mirror. And the man in the mirror thinks he is telling a tale to the man he sees in the mirror. … And as you are read this, I am writing a story about you reading a story about me writing this story. Did this tell this story to me or did I tell it to you?”

Duane Stephen Michals was born on February 18, 1932, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a steel town that was a suburb of Pittsburgh. He once described the area as “the American Ruhr. It was cheek to jowl little cities, each one with—built around the mill.” At the bottom of the social hierarchy in a town like McKeesport, he told Christopher Lyon for a Smithsonian Archives of American Art oral history in 2016, were the steelworkers, which included his father, John. His mother, Margaret, was a live-in domestic who saw Duane and his younger brother, Timothy, on the weekends. His grandparents had immigrated to the US in the 19th century from Slovakia.

Though his family would have been at “the bottom of the barrel,” Michals said he loved it, adding “I still to this day romanticize it a lot, and I feel good about it.” Throughout his life he would continue to read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (first in print, then online). And his childhood home would serve as the subject of a 2000 image entitled, The House I Once Called Home, which he writes in cursive above a black-and-white photograph of a three-story building; below he adds: “A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMOIR WITH VERSE.” On the sides of the image, Michals adds, “This abandoned wooden box is the cabinet where my family’s curiosities are stored. I now reopen all its shuttered windows and unlock all its boarded doors.”

At 14, he won a drawing contest that allowed him to take weekend art classes at the Carnegie Institute (now the Carnegie Museum of Art). In 1949, he left Pittsburgh to study design on a scholarship at the University of Denver. He earned his degree in 1953 and then was stationed for two years in Germany as a second lieutenant for the US Army. He moved to New York in the 1950s and worked for various magazines, including Dance, Time, and Sports Illustrated, as an art director and layout designer.

Michals first came to photography in 1958, when he got together the funds to visit the USSR at the height of the Cold War.  “He borrowed a friend’s 35mm Argus C3 camera,” Benedict-Jones wrote in the 2014 catalog, “but declined the opportunity to take along a light meter because he did not want to be mistaken for someone who knew how to use a camera.”

He returned with tender portraits of the everyday people he encountered, and soon began taking on photography assignments for magazines like Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Mademoiselle, and American Vogue, as well as for the Mexican government of the 1968 Olympic Games. He met architect Frederick Gorrée in 1960; they would spend their lives together until Gorrée’s death in 2017, marrying in 2011.

Michals’s first mature artistic series would foreshadow his later interests. Having lived in New York City for about a decade, he wanted to show a different side of the City That Never Sleeps. Instead, he photographed the quietude of the city, without a soul in sight: street corners, bodegas, diners, theaters, laundromats, even Coney Island. He called the series “Empty New York.” “People who did New York always did Times Square,” Michals told the New Yorker of the series in 1971. “People don’t live in Times Square. I shot the laundromat, the luncheonette, the liquor store—interior spaces.”

Next would come his “Sequences.” “After I did empty rooms for a while, they began to look like stage sets to me, and I felt that I wanted to interject myself more into the picture. I have never wanted to be a reporter or an observer,” he told the New Yorker.

Some of his earliest “Sequences” would in part be inspired by his mother’s death and, as he recounted in the Smithsonian oral history, his experience reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead to her while she was on her deathbed. His next book would be called The Journey of the Spirit After Death, which was more directly inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

“I often deal with the subject of death, which intrigues me enormously,” he continued in the New Yorker interview. “Death is unphotographable. I don’t mean the fact of death—there are always corpses, accidents, and weeping women. I mean the idea of death and its metaphysical implications. ‘The Journey of the Spirit After Death’ deals with the idea of death.”

At the same time as he was creating this inventive approach to photography, Michals also turned his attention to one of art’s most classic genres, the portrait. But as with his other work, he added his own twist to it, producing portraits that are equally enigmatic to his “Sequences.” Instead of showing the subject head on, they both seem to reveal and conceal the sitter’s inner thoughts. Among the most famous of these are the images that form the basis of A Visit with Magritte, published in 1981. Michals visited the Surrealist in 1965, and they spent five days together despite not speaking the same language. Many of the images that Michals produced are equally as mind-bending as the canvases that Magritte had painted decades earlier. Nodding to Magritte’s now iconic 1964 painting The Son of Man, Magritte with Hat (ca. 1965), for example, shows the artist balancing a bowler hat, upside down, on his head, while an eerie image of Magritte holding the hat is superimposed on the other image.

Other portraits include Robert Rauschenberg (1963), showing just a close-up of the artist’s mouth, and Oldenburg (1970), featuring the artist’s face distorted via a magnifying glass. Willem de Kooning (1985) shows the back of the artist as he looks at one of his paintings, while Alice Neel (ca. 1970), one of Michals’s few color images from this era, also shows Neel from the back as she looks into a mirror, which reflects back two of her paintings.  Joseph Cornell (1972), made the year of Cornell’s death, shows half the silhouette of a figure looking at a bureau.

Though Michals is best-known for the ways in which he broke down the conventions of photography, at times with a filmmaker’s sensibility, he would soon turn to making short films, beginning in 2015. Those two would show the artist’s distinct approach to questioning what exactly the viewer is looking at.

ZIP ZAP ZIP (2018), for example, shows Michals standing before a camera wearing a mask as he says the following: “I am speaking this sentence. This is the sentence that I am speaking. The sentence says, ‘This is the sentence that I am speaking.’” This all makes sense until you realize that Michals’s reading is actually being played via a recording. “Michals, for his part, seems fully aware of this paradox,” Jackson Arn wrote in Art in America on the occasion of Michals’s 2019 retrospective at the Morgan Library & Museum. “There’s no mistaking the faint, playful quaver in his taped voice, and you get the sense that his masked face is a second away from erupting into laughter.”

Michals has long been influential to generations of photographers, but more recently that influence has extended to other fields. Last fall, he shot actor Jacob Elordi for Bottega Veneta a suite of photographs and short film, captured at the artist’s Manhattan home. The collaboration took Michals’s 1994 photograph “What Are Dreams,” showing a handsome young man who appears to be sleeping on a table next to a snow globe of the famed New York City landmarks, as inspiration.

Michals’s tongue-in-cheek sense of humor extended beyond the images he made to his conception of his approach to art-making as a whole. On the endpaper for his 2014 catalog, he writes, in his typical scrawl, “A FAILED ATTEMPT TO PHOTOGRAPH REALITY / How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearances of trees and automobiles and people with reality itself and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph NOTHING.”