Duane Michals, the American photographer known for his photo sequences, has died aged 94, his gallery has announced.
Born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, Michals trained as a graphic designer. His interest in photography arose during a trip to the USSR in 1958, when he took pictures of people he encountered with a borrowed camera. The resulting photographs formed the basis of his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the city’s Underground Gallery.
In 1950, Michals moved to New York, where he remained for the rest of his life. The city became the subject of one of his best known works, the Empty New York series (1964), which shows early morning scenes of vacant shops and abandoned streets inspired by the works of Eugène Atget.
During this time, a golden age of street photography stirred by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s broadly influential ‘decisive moment’, Michals moved away from the single-frame, photojournalistic work and started experimenting with what became his signature sequences. Works such as The Spirit Leaves the Body (1968) incorporated double exposures to create surreal, dreamlike narratives that expanded beyond the possibilities of story telling within a single, dominant image. In 1970, his body of work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Michals remained active well into his 90s. His later works featured handwritten text around photographs and in 2015 he began working with videos and films 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 currently at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, through 10 September.
