Duane Michals

From Graphic Design to Photography

Michals was born in 1932 in the steel town of McKeesport, Pennsylvania. After college he studied at Parsons School of Design and worked in graphic design for magazines and advertising. The Hugh Edwards archive at the Art Institute of Chicago records that he began photographing seriously during a 1958 trip to the Soviet Union, then returned to New York and pursued commercial portraiture alongside private work.^*20 DC Moore Gallery likewise emphasizes that while he made fashion photographs and portraits of public figures for work, he began developing photographic sequences on his own terms in the mid-1960s.^*17 The Smithsonian Archives of American Art preserves an oral history of more than five hours recorded in his home and studio in 2016, allowing his path from childhood through commercial assignments and personal work to be followed in his own words.^*22

American photography at the time granted considerable authority to the idea that reality in the street could be condensed into a single frame. A Carnegie Museum of Art retrospective centers Michals’s dissatisfaction with conventions in documentary and fine-art photography and his development of another mode of narration through sequences and handwritten text.^*2 A 1971 New Yorker profile follows his movement from photographing empty rooms toward inventing events, directing people, and addressing invisible states of mind and death.^*1

1960s New York: Queer Invisibility

When Michals began making sequences in the 1960s, openly expressing same-sex relationships in New York public space carried serious restrictions. The National Park Service records that throughout the decade many forms of openly gay life conflicted with laws, regulations, and policies, while police raids on bars, arrests, and humiliating treatment remained common.^*27 The Smithsonian National Museum of American History likewise notes that organized gay-rights movements already existed in the 1950s, but safe public spaces were limited and raids, harassment, and arrest remained part of daily life.^*28 Within that social setting, Michals distributed desire across glances, passing encounters, memory, and handwritten language. His interest in the “invisible” therefore joined metaphysical concerns with the concrete problem of how private experience that was difficult to show publicly could enter photography.

Discomfort with the “Decisive Moment” and the Photographic Sequence

In a MoMA audio commentary, Michals explains that if photography were limited to the “decisive moment” that captures something happening in front of the camera, much of his experience—dreams, anxiety, sexual fantasy, awareness of death—would fall outside the work.^*5 He therefore refused to make a single image the final form and instead used sequences read frame by frame. Even a simple progression—a person moving down a corridor, passing someone else, then disappearing—creates time and causality in the gaps between images. MoMA’s Chance Meeting is a representative work showing that this method was already established by the late 1960s.^*16

When Chance Meeting was made in the mid-1960s, homosexuality in the United States did not occupy the public cultural position it does today. Before Stonewall, police intervention in gay bars and public discrimination against gay people continued, and actions such as the 1966 Sip-In at Julius’ Bar made the very existence of a public place where one could “safely be oneself” a political issue.^*29 Smithsonian LGBTQ+ history material likewise shows that visibility and safety structured everyday life at the time.^*28 Within those conditions, extending a fleeting exchange of looks between two men across several frames had a formal necessity. The sequence shifts desire from proof through an explicit act toward a socially difficult-to-read interval of glances and time.

Chance Meeting: Looking and Queer Desire

Chance Meeting turns a brief event—two men passing in an alley and looking back—into a photographic sequence. In 1960s New York, public expressions of same-sex intimacy carried legal and social risk, and the 1966 Julius’ Bar “Sip-In” demonstrates a period in which activists still had to publicly challenge the refusal of service to gay patrons.^*29 The work’s importance lies in photographing desire between men as a structure of looking and duration. Instead of fixing desire in a single decisive scene, the sequence asks the viewer to recognize the relationship by reading the initial passing, the backward glance, and the distance left between the figures. In MoMA’s audio commentary, Michals recalls that when he was growing up, being gay was not publicly recognized as a viable option, and speaks about the need to affirm the legitimacy of affection between people of the same sex.^*5 The sequence becomes both a technique for representing time and a means of turning desire excluded from public visibility into a photographic experience that must be read progressively.

Things Are Queer: A Photograph Returns inside the Photograph

Things Are Queer is a nine-image sequence in which the viewpoint shifts from a room to a giant leg, then to a book and a photograph, until the viewer discovers that the opening scene was itself a picture inside a book. A work in the New Mexico Museum of Art collection makes that circular structure legible as an actual sequence.^*10 A Queer Cultural Center essay identifies the repeated reversals of scale, reality, and representation—and the resulting instability of the judgment “what is real?”—as central to the work.^*18 By inserting one photograph inside another, Michals structurally undermines the idea that photography is a transparent window onto reality.

Another print in the New Mexico Museum of Art collection confirms that Things Are Queer depends on reading several same-sized photographs in order.^*11 Images that appear individually as strange scenes become, in sequence, a structure that repeatedly updates the scale and position of “the reality being seen now.” The persuasive detail of photography produces conviction, while the appearance of another photograph destabilizes that conviction. The sequence functions less as a container for explaining a story than as a device that changes the viewer’s perception over time.

Conceptual Art and the Photographic Sequence

From the late 1960s into the 1970s, Conceptual Art frequently used photography as evidence of an action or idea. Michals worked with photographic sequence during the same years but moved in the opposite direction from documentary transparency. MoMA’s 1970 exhibition Stories by Duane Michals shows that museum institutions recognized his sequences early as complete narrative structures.^*7 In his photographs, a later frame revises the meaning of the one before it, and “fact” remains unstable even at the end. His work developed alongside Conceptual photography while turning back toward the evidentiary status of photography itself as a problem.

Handwritten Text and Double Exposure

From the 1970s onward, Michals increasingly wrote directly on prints in his own hand instead of relying on conventional captions. The Carnegie Museum of Art presents handwritten sentences and short poems as a central method for adding meanings or contradictions that the image alone does not supply.^*3 Handwriting inserts memory and a speaking voice that cannot be photographed, giving the image another temporal layer. Princeton University Art Museum describes Michals’s turn to writing in the 1970s as a response to dissatisfaction with what photographs alone could say, and notes that the handwritten text introduces off-frame narratives of grief, desire, melancholy, and other states.^*25

Double exposure served the same larger problem. In The Human Condition, the outline of a body overlaps with light, producing in both individual frames and the sequence a transformation that suggests spirit separating from the body. The Morgan Library & Museum collection page allows the work’s sequential structure and prints to be examined.^*8 Getty holds a substantial group of Michals photographs, showing that sequences, portraiture, and double exposure were sustained methods rather than temporary experiments.^*9 Princeton’s How Nice to Watch You Take a Bath (1986) combines five gelatin silver prints and handwritten text into a single horizontal sequence, treating image, writing, and time between frames as materials of the same work.^*24

René Magritte and the Instability of the Visible

In 1965, Michals visited René Magritte in Belgium and made his portrait. He continued to return to the Surrealist idea that visible reality itself can be doubted. SFMOMA’s René Magritte records that direct encounter.^*21 In a Los Angeles Times interview, Michals also describes meeting Magritte and the idea that photography need not be limited to facts as important parts of his development.^*15 He translated Magritte’s thinking into specifically photographic means: sequential still images, exposure, and handwriting.

Between Commercial Portraiture and Private Work

The parallel existence of private experimental work and commercial portraiture is another important condition of Michals’s career. The Smithsonian Archives of American Art preserves magazine, advertising, and portrait assignments alongside sequences, handwritten works, and other personal projects within the same archive.^*23 Moving between commercial portraiture, which must often make a public figure look recognizably “like themselves” in a single frame, and private work that destabilizes certainty across multiple images offers a concrete way to understand his mistrust of immediate single-image reading. Precisely because photographs function socially as tools for identity and personality, his private work repeatedly breaks that function on purpose.

Between Narrative Photography and Conceptual Photography

In 1970, MoMA presented Stories by Duane Michals, bringing photographic narrative built from sequential images into the museum as a coherent body of work.^*7 Within an institution that often evaluated photography through the visual completeness of individual prints, works composed of several small images read in sequence proposed a different duration of viewing and a different display logic. Carnegie Museum of Art’s 2014 retrospective revisited his career from early to late work through the figure of the “storyteller,” positioning him across Conceptual photography, staged photography, and text-based work.^*4

From the perspective of current photographic history, sequences and handwritten text are central methods through which Michals reworked photography’s claim to evidence. Carnegie Museum of Art’s retrospective reframed him as a storyteller because his photographs relocate value from the visual completeness of one image toward the time between frames, words, performance, and the viewer’s inference.^*4 Read through queer history, sequences such as Chance Meeting also offered a way to bring same-sex desire—difficult to show publicly at the time—into photography.^*27 In Things Are Queer and The Human Condition, the same sequential form expands toward questions of reality and death. Queer self-experience formed an important ground for his work, from which the subject widened to perception and mortality. Beginning from private experience, Michals challenged the medium’s tendency to treat only what is visibly pictured as evidence, giving him a position that crosses Conceptual photography, staged photography, and queer expression.

The Smithsonian Archives of American Art preserves 31.6 linear feet of material on Michals, including commercial and fine-art prints, photobooks and mock-ups, sequences, correspondence, and lecture records. The archive makes the whole process of publication, sequencing, and writing—not only finished single photographs—available for research.^*23 Michals’s importance does not depend on claiming historical “firsts,” but on the rigor with which he made the sequence his primary language. Photographic history contains earlier examples of sequences and narrative structures, yet from the 1960s onward he consistently integrated intervals between images, writing, exposure, and performance within the same work. Carnegie’s educational material explicitly presents this approach as an alternative to a photographic culture dominated by the single image.^*6 His lasting critical force lies in continuing to ask how far photography can carry experiences that its evidentiary power cannot by itself contain.