Duane Michals is an American photographer born in 1932 in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, U.S. Now he is 91 and he is known as a portrait and sequential pictures photographer. Duan became interested in art in his young age therefore he studied at several institutions such as Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg, University of Denver in Colorado, Parsons School of Design in New York City. He began with doing people's portraits but then decided to change his vector onto sequential pictures.
We can see the example of his portraits photography in the above picture.
Michals preferred to make portraits of people in their environments and included bright graphic add-ons in oil, such as checkered, multicolor objects, polka dots and many other embellishments. Here we can see it present in the picture where we have one woman split into three different states.
After some time Duane decided to change his approach to expressive photography into street photography and started to make sequential images. In the above picture we can see meeting of two men by chance. One of them seems to recognise the other one and the second men turns to him but we still don't know if they know each other.
Here is another example of Duane's works with sequential images. It is my favourite one and it was first which caught my attention. We can see here kind of a play with the mirror to see different sides of the person. Also I think it is about the way how we see ourselves in the mirror depending on the angle of it. It seems to be a reflection of just one person but when we change the mirror's position we can find lots of different reflections.
I love Duane's way of doing portraits because there are not ordinary as we used to. I would definitely like to try similar approach to his one. I am impressed by the difference in his works, when I browsed some of his works I could think they are from different photographers. It is so great when people try to open something new for themselves, in this case to explore more ways of photography.
References
Adam Augustyn | Profile: Duane Michales, Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Duane-Michals
DC Moore Gallery| Duane Michals. Available at: https://www.dcmooregallery.com/artists/duane-michals/series/portraits?view=slider#4
Well done on researching deeper into Duane Michals' work and finding other sequential images that he created. I was intrigued when I saw the image of Barbra Streisand, especially with your love of Breakfast at Tiffany's. I would recommend Streisand in Funny Girl.
ReplyDeleteYou have referenced well, however I would have like to have seen some deeper analysis of the images from you.