Duane Michals, photographer identified for sequenced works, 1932–2026

Duane Michals, the American photographer identified for his photograph sequences, has died aged 94, his gallery has introduced. 

Born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Michals educated as a graphic designer. His curiosity in images arose throughout a visit to the USSR in 1958, when he took footage of individuals he encountered with a borrowed digicam. The ensuing images shaped the premise of his first solo exhibition in 1963 on the metropolis’s Underground Gallery. 

In 1950, Michals moved to New York, the place he remained for the remainder of his life. The metropolis turned the topic of certainly one of his finest identified works, the Empty New York collection (1964), which reveals early morning scenes of vacant retailers and deserted streets impressed by the works of Eugène Atget. 

During this time, a golden age of avenue images stirred by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s broadly influential ‘decisive moment’, Michals moved away from the single-frame, photojournalistic work and began experimenting with what turned his signature sequences. Works resembling The Spirit Leaves the Body (1968) included double exposures to create surreal, dreamlike narratives that expanded past the probabilities of story telling inside a single, dominant picture. In 1970, his physique of labor was the topic of a solo exhibition on the Museum of Modern Art.

Michals remained energetic effectively into his 90s. His later works featured handwritten textual content round images and in 2015 he started working with movies and movies in collaboration with Josiah Cuneo.

Retrospectives of his works have been held at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh (2015), the Morgan Library in New York (2019) and at present at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, via 10 September.