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| This book has been one of my prized possessions since I bought it nearly two decades ago. Photo: Abby Ferguson |
Sitting on my bookshelf immediately behind my desk is a copy of Duane Michals’ The House I Once Called Home, inscribed to me by the artist himself. I’ve had it for nearly two decades, and I still pick it up from time to time because it has had such a significant influence on me as an artist and photographer. And so, it was with deep sadness that I learned Michals passed away on June 9.
The DC Moore Gallery, which represented Michals, confirmed his death at the hospital following a short illness. He was 94.
For anyone who has spent serious time studying the art of photography, Michals is one of those artists who fundamentally changes how you think about what the medium can do. His influences were more literary and surrealist than photographic, including William Blake, René Magritte, Lewis Carroll and Joseph Cornell. He published more than forty books over his career and continued exhibiting well into his 90s.
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He came to prominence in the early 1960s, when photography was largely defined by documentation and reportage, but he wanted no part of that. Instead, he built sequences of staged black-and-white images that played out like short films, frequently using multiple exposures. These were often accompanied by handwritten text that told you, as he put it, “what you can’t see.”
“You are either defined by the medium, or you’re redefining the medium.”
Michals was self-taught, never belonged to a movement, and didn’t seem particularly interested in fitting in anywhere. As he once said, “You are either defined by the medium, or you’re redefining the medium,” and he truly lived that throughout his career.
I had the chance to see Michals lecture when I was in undergrad, and I distinctly remember his wit. It was there that he signed one of my favorite photography books. He was one of my very first photographic influences, inspiring me to explore concepts of memory more deeply and leading me to start employing multiple exposures in my work. In fact, those multiple exposures were part of what led to my acceptance into graduate school and became the basis for my graduate thesis work.
Photography lost one of its true originals this week. But his books, and the boundary-pushing ideas within them, aren’t going anywhere.
Our DPREVIEW Tribute:
After nearly 25 years of operation, DPReview closed on 10 April 2023. This difficult decision was part of the annual operating plan review that parent company, Amazon, shared earlier this year.
Over the course of 25 years, DP Review built up a reputation as being one of the most informative places to go for information about that new camera or lens you’re after. DP Review began as an independent reviews site based in the UK in 1998, the brainchild of Philip and Joanna Askey, but it was eventually purchased by Amazon in 2007 and relocated over to Seattle in the USA in 2010.
Cheers DPReview – thanks for the great work and content that guided photographers, videographers and techno junkies the world over!