Duane Michals, who has died aged 94, was a pioneer of the \u201cdirectorial mode\u201d of photography, known for staging his tableaux and for posing his subjects in a range of roles from an angel to an everyman. The results were a mixture of the profound, the profane and the puckish, tilting at issues of life and death. As Michals was fond of saying: \u201cI think that if you\u2019re a very serious person, it\u2019s very important to be very silly.\u201d<\/p>\n
He was inspired by imagery from his Catholic childhood and by surrealism. In Paradise Regained (1968), a man and woman in a sitting room are gradually, in a series of six photographs, divested of all their clothes and possessions (save a clock), as their room becomes filled with pot plants. This Garden of Eden-cum-garden centre is typical of his wit and wisdom, with the plodding story-boarding and seemingly profound engagement offering a sort of \u201cphoto-cartoon\u201d philosophical inquiry.<\/p>\n
The grim reaper in Death Comes to the Old Lady (1969) wears a suit and whisks her away. Take One and See Mt Fujiyama (1976) culminates in the comedy ending of a man confusing the vision of a snow-capped summit with a stiff lump in his Y-fronts. The Fallen Angel (1968) alights in the room of a sleeping woman whom he seduces \u2013 then, plunged into remorse, he sheds his wings and slumps off as an ordinary mortal in a shabby jacket.<\/p>\n
Chance Meeting, 1970, six gelatin silver photographs with hand-applied text on retro inscribed by the artist. Photograph: @Duane Michals. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York<\/p>\n
A Letter from My Father (1975) has an earlier portrait of his younger brother standing in front of his parents, coupled with Michals\u2019s writing in despair of his relationship with his father. A Failed Attempt to Photograph Reality (1975) does not even feature a photograph \u2013 simply a few lines written on blank photographic paper asserting photography\u2019s inability to do more than record appearances, a dominant theme in Michals\u2019s work. \u201cPhotographers are always describing the package very well, but they never talk about the content,\u201d he said. \u201cThey show me the what of things but they don\u2019t show me the why or how of things.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michals was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a steel town near Pittsburgh, to a family of Czech origin. His father, John, worked in the steel mill and his mother, Margaret (nee Matik), was a housekeeper. Theirs was not a happy marriage. \u201cThey pretended to be a family, like actors pantomiming two different plays on one stage at the same time,\u201d Michals said. He revisited his troubled childhood frequently in his work; both at a distance, by looking at his relationship with his remote father, and by returning in later life to his by-then-abandoned family home.<\/p>\n
Although raised as a devout Roman Catholic he subsequently rejected religion. At 14 he took a weekly watercolour class at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, later graduating from the University of Denver with a BA in art, before studying graphic design at the Parsons School, New York.<\/p>\n
Photography by Duane Michals<\/p>\n
In 1958 he went on a three-week trip to Russia and, with a borrowed camera, took a series of portraits and cityscapes. After the portraits were included in a group exhibition alongside work by the emergent street photographer Garry Winogrand, Michals dropped graphic design and took up photography, working initially on a series of publicity stills for a long-running Broadway musical, which subsidised his early artistic development. He continued commercial portrait photography for much of his career, working for Vogue<\/a> magazine and undertaking other high-profile commissions, including the cover of Synchronicity, the 1983 album by the Police.<\/p>\n His next series, Empty New York (1964-65), featuring deserted lobbies, vacant bars and bare buses, echoed Eugene Atget\u2019s images of a depopulated Old Paris, the celebrated documentary photography admired by the surrealists.<\/p>\n