Duane Michals, the photographer who pioneered the "directorial mode" of photography by staging narrative tableaux and using double exposures, has died aged 94. His work blended surrealism with Catholic imagery, tackling profound themes of life, death, and identity with a mix of wit and wisdom. As Michals often said, "I think that if you're a very serious person, it's very important to be very silly."
Early Life and Influences
Born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, a steel town near Pittsburgh, to a family of Czech origin, Michals experienced a troubled childhood. His father, John, worked in the steel mill, and his mother, Margaret (née Matik), was a housekeeper. Their unhappy marriage left a lasting impression. "They pretended to be a family, like actors pantomiming two different plays on one stage at the same time," Michals recalled. He revisited these themes frequently in his work, exploring his relationship with his remote father and returning to the abandoned family home later in life.
Raised a devout Roman Catholic, Michals later rejected religion. At 14, he attended a weekly watercolour class at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. He graduated from the University of Denver with a BA in art and studied graphic design at the Parsons School in New York.
Career Beginnings and Breakthrough
In 1958, Michals took a three-week trip to Russia with a borrowed camera, capturing portraits and cityscapes. After these portraits were included in a group exhibition alongside work by street photographer Garry Winogrand, Michals abandoned graphic design for photography. He supported his early artistic development by producing publicity stills for a long-running Broadway musical. For much of his career, he continued commercial portrait photography, working for Vogue and undertaking high-profile commissions, including the cover of Synchronicity (1983) by the Police.
His series Empty New York (1964-65) featured deserted lobbies, vacant bars, and bare buses, echoing Eugène Atget's depopulated Paris scenes. In 1965, he visited surrealist artist René Magritte in Brussels, spending a week with him and making portraits using double exposures. Magritte showed him home movies, and they watched Bonanza dubbed in French. This encounter deepened Michals's surrealist influence, leading him to disavow documentary photography, declaring, "to photograph reality is to photograph nothing."
Directorial Mode and Signature Works
Michals began creating sets of staged photographs forming narratives or sequences, using double exposures and rudimentary printing techniques. He often wrote in ink on the pictures, grateful that his lack of formal photographic education freed him from prevailing strictures: "I didn't know that you weren't supposed to write on a photograph."
Notable works include Paradise Regained (1968), a series of six photographs showing a man and woman gradually stripped of clothes and possessions as their room fills with pot plants. Death Comes to the Old Lady (1969) depicts the grim reaper in a suit whisking an old woman away. Take One and See Mt Fujiyama (1976) ends comically with a man confusing a snow-capped summit with a lump in his underwear. The Fallen Angel (1968) shows an angel seducing a sleeping woman, then shedding his wings in remorse. A Letter from My Father (1975) couples a portrait of his younger brother with text despairing of his father. A Failed Attempt to Photograph Reality (1975) features only text on blank photographic paper, asserting photography's limits. "Photographers are always describing the package very well, but they never talk about the content," Michals said. "They show me the what of things but they don't show me the why or how of things."
Later Work and Legacy
At age 70, after his parents' deaths, Michals returned to McKeesport to photograph the remains of his childhood home. The House I Once Called Home pairs old prints with images of the overgrown, derelict house, using double exposures to superimpose his parents' portraits on the ruins. This work is less playful, with memories overpowering imagination.
Michals maintained a polemical attitude toward the photographic establishment. His later work incorporated painting, including overpainting prints by photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson. "People believe in the reality of photographs, but not in the reality of paintings," he said. "That gives photographers an enormous advantage. Unfortunately photographers also believe in the reality of photographs."
His long-term partner, Frederick Gorree, an architect whom he married in 2011, died in 2017.
