Duane Michals

Duane Michals is an American photographer, born in 1932 Pennsylvania. He was first interested in art and design from the age of 14 and attended different universities studying watercolour and graphic design. It wasn’t until 1958 that Michals discovered his passion for photography. Since then, he has worked in commercial photography, filming and location photography such as location portraits and the 1968 Summer Olympics. Michals work has been included in many solo and group exhibitions since 1970 to present day. He has completed several books ad films and won three very prestigious awards.

Micheals is known for his work with series, multiple exposure and use of text. These are the main themes to his work however also contain a lot of emotion. With the combination of his style of photography and the text he presents his images with contain a lot of passion and are very powerful. He has hand written the text where some images include just his name, or a title whereas some include a sentence or paragraph. By doing this, especially in his own hand writing, gives the image a lot of emotion and meaning and represents how Michals himself interprets his own image. Longer text almost narrates the one image into a story making it very interesting. Michals’s use of series between several images is very effective. All of the images in the sequence are framed exactly the same with only the models in motion between shots. These collections also have a narrative which is explained by Michals simple words. The use of multiple flash exposure, is also very effective throughout Michals’s work. It works well with the theme of emotion within portraits. Having two figures of the same person in the same image is very powerful and can represent many different expressions.

The images that Michals has taken are all very controlled and performed to allow him to capture the specific image he was trying to create. It is visible that the model in the images have been clearly instructed specifically in terms of their body, gaze, expressions etc. The lighting in the photographs are mostly natural with some shots including artificial lighting for more control. Michals has produced most colour and black and white images. The images in colour only seem to be the ones that contain a lot of colour where Michals has set out to capture colour. Also, he has used a wide depth of field so his images are in pin sharp focus while the focal length varies between images.

I really like Duane Michals work because I think he expresses and communicates emotion very effectively through photography. Generally, I like his style and technique that he has used between each image. The fact that he has also included text written by hand makes every image more powerful while showing passion in his work. I would definitely be interesting in trying to incorporate this into my own work.