in 2019<\/a>.<\/p>\nWhile other photographers of his era found material in the chaos of street life or the majesty of nature, he took inspiration for his pictorial storytelling from the images and writings of William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Cornell and Ren\u00e9 Magritte.<\/p>\n
A typical Michals work might be structured like a comic strip, with multiple panels of black-and-white photographs accompanied by handwritten titles or captions, or both.<\/p>\n
The prints were usually small and not individually consequential. He might need as few as four or as many as 30 to complete a piece. His works could depict a metaphysical reckoning between strangers (\u201cChance Meeting,\u201d 1970); a ribald sex comedy (\u201cTake One and See Mt. Fujiyama,\u201d 1975); a cryptic parable with biblical overtones (\u201cThe Return of the Prodigal Son,\u201d 1982); a children\u2019s fable with a moral (\u201cGrandmother and Odette Visit the Park,\u201d 1992); or a reminiscence of growing up (\u201cThe House I Once Called Home,\u201d 2003).<\/p>\n
Sometimes he would write beneath each photograph in a sequence; other times he relied on the title alone to do the explanatory lifting.<\/p>\n
\u201cDeath Comes to the Old Lady\u201d (1969) consists of five panels without text. In the first, a seated woman stares at the camera. In the next two panels, a man in a dark suit appears by her side. He is first seen as a blur and then dissolves into a black shadow except for his hand, placed on her shoulder. In the last photo, she rises and dissolves into blurry shadow herself. (To play the Old Lady, Mr. Michals enlisted his grandmother; he chose his father to be Death.)<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I write, it\u2019s to talk about what you cannot see in the photograph,\u201d he said in a 2019 interview. \u201cIt\u2019s to augment the photograph, to give voice to the silence of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
These literary accompaniments were often wry or lyrical. \u201cMy Father Could Walk in the Sky\u201d (1989), a double exposure of a naked man seen from below against a dark, starry sky, was accompanied by rhyming couplets: \u201cMy father could walk in the sky \/ He promised to teach me how \/ But he left without saying goodbye \/ I don\u2019t cry, I\u2019m a grownup now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite early recognition for Mr. Michals\u2019s photographs \u2014 they were included in the landmark \u201cContemporary Photographers: Towards a Social Landscape\u201d exhibit at the George Eastman House (now Museum) in Rochester, N.Y., in 1966, and he had a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 \u2014 they never commanded particularly high prices.<\/p>\n
That rankled him as he aged \u2014 he had a curmudgeonly side \u2014 and he openly satirized younger artists like Cindy Sherman and Andreas Gursky, who were able to make a living by selling prints to collectors. Mr. Michals supported himself from the 1970s to the \u201990s with corporate commissions and by doing celebrity portraits for Newsweek, Fortune and other magazines.<\/p>\n
Duane Stephen Michals was born on Feb. 18, 1932, in McKeesport, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh. His father, John, was a steelworker; his mother, Margaret (Matik) Michals, was a live-in domestic who saw her son and his brother, Timothy, only on weekends.<\/p>\n
As a boy, Duane had an interest in drawing that was nurtured by classes at the Carnegie Museum, and in 1949 he earned a scholarship to study graphic design at the University of Denver. After graduating with a bachelor\u2019s degree in 1953, he enlisted in the R.O.T.C., serving two years in Germany before moving to New York City in 1955 to work in publishing.<\/p>\n
He discovered photography by chance in 1958, after borrowing a camera from a friend to take on a trip to the Soviet Union. His first efforts were documentary in nature. They found their fullest expression in \u201cEmpty New York\u201d (1964-65), a series that portrayed Manhattan\u2019s deserted streets, subway cars, lunch counters and shop fronts in the detached style of Eug\u00e8ne Atget\u2019s photographs of Paris at the turn of the 20th century. (Mr. Michals\u2019s documentary images were largely unknown as a series until 2018, when he published them as a book.)<\/p>\n
Atget\u2019s work led him toward the surrealism of Magritte, Cornell and Giorgio de Chirico. Eventually Mr. Michals renounced documentary photography as insufficient for his artistic ambitions. \u201cTo photograph reality,\u201d he once said, \u201cis to photograph nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
He considered himself lucky that he didn\u2019t have to \u201cunlearn\u201d what was taught in art school. \u201cI didn\u2019t know that you weren\u2019t supposed to write on a photograph,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Although his sequenced photographs were staged, the theatrical constructions were seldom costly or elaborate. The sets were spare; the props, often little more than a chair, a bed and a potted plant. In \u201cThe Spirit Leaves the Body\u201d (1968), the first of seven panels shows a naked man lying on a covered table. Double exposures of his body then depict a shadowy figure sitting up, standing and walking toward the camera until the figure fills the frame.<\/p>\n
Short and slight, and bald by the time he was in his 30s, Mr. Michals was openly gay well before it was widely accepted. For more than 50 years, he shared an apartment<\/a> in Manhattan with Frederick Gorree, an architect. They were married from 2011 until Mr. Gorree\u2019s death in 2017. Mr. Michals has no immediate survivors.<\/p>\nMr. Michals ignored trends in political or conceptual art. His art often empathized with the anxieties of the very young (\u201cThe Bogeyman,\u201d 1973) or the old (\u201cGrandpa Goes to Heaven,\u201d 1989). In recent years, he collaborated with Josiah Cuneo, a director, to make short films on comical or fantastical themes that were recognizably akin to his photographic sequences.<\/p>\n
Seeking to bridge the chasm between the phenomenal and spiritual worlds, his work often illustrated his frustrations as well as his questions. As an artist, Mr. Michals devoted himself single-mindedly, but seldom without humor, to what could \u2014 and couldn\u2019t \u2014 be said in words or shown in a photograph.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe the only true knowledge is through experience,\u201d he said. \u201cYou read a love story, and then you fall in love \u2014 then you realize the difference. I want to know what something feels like, not what it looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Richard B. Woodward, a journalist and critic who wrote widely about the arts, died in 2023.<\/p>\n
Ash Wu contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Duane Michals, an impish, provocative artist who used his camera to tell stories with quirky, cosmic, enigmatic or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":696202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,175677,229,301654,88,301653,1999,688],"class_list":["post-696201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-deaths-obituaries","tag-design","tag-duane","tag-entertainment","tag-michals","tag-new-york-city","tag-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=696201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/696202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=696201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=696201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=696201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}