Duane Michals


Andy Wharol, on the cover of the book "Duane Michals", 
Centre National de la Photographie (France), 1986


Duane Michals is one of the authors that my tutor suggested to me in reference to assignment 4. 

Duane Michals (McKeesport, Pennsylvania, 1932) is an American photographer of Czechoslovakian origin (his real surname was Mihals). 

During a trip to the Soviet Union in 1958, he discovers he loves photography. Back in the USA, he begins his dual activity as a commercial photographer and photographic artist. 

In 1963, five years after the trip to Russia, he opens his first photographic exhibition, with the photographs taken during that trip.

Michals understands that he is interested in other themes, which drive inspiration from painters such as Magritte and Balthus. These themes start from the documentary reality of the portraits in their daily environment and cross over into the imagination, the "memento mori" and into the never resolved personal conflicts on identity, duality, starting from the particular relationship with the original meaning of the name, Duane, and its curious assonance with "dual".

A few years after his first exhibition, Michals feels limited by the impossibility of recording, through the camera, something that goes beyond the real and that is in the world of the imagination.

He thus begins to experiment on analog techniques such as long exposures, blur, overlays, double exposures, ghostly silhouettes and narrative techniques as sequences. In this way, he can express symbolism and a narrative that goes towards the dream. 

His works, starting from 1974, are accompanied by handwritten narratives, which are useful for explaining the content of the images obtained with these methods, and which show us the dissatisfaction of an author still in search of a path. 

Many images are raw, are not oriented to photographic precision and quality, and are very close to pictorial works. In fact, over the years he decides to intervene with pictorial actions on photographic images, also of other authors such as Bresson or Adams, to then sign them as his own. In this regard, his artistic actions remind me of an author like Oliver Laric, on whom I wrote a post.
 
The duality, the double, are literally obsessions that accompany Michals throughout his life, as real and imaginary, life and death, original surname and modified surname, a double career in the photographic field, mirror images.

 ".....I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection...."
(Duane Michals, 1974, from "This Photograph Is My Proof")

Among the photographic works of Duane Michals, I have chosen an example of those that inspired me most to realize part of the work in Assignment 5.




Duane Michals, "Chance Meeting"


Duane Michals, "I build a Pyramid", 1978
https://www.phillips.com/detail/duane-michals/NY040217/190
accessed on 27/12/2021