Duane Michals – The Portraitist

Duane Michals – The Portraitist presents the first comprehensive overview of portraits by Duane Michals, a pioneering photographer who in the 1960s broke away from established traditions of documentary photography. He is well known for staging photographs that tell stories like a progression of film stills, as well as for adding handwritten captions, messages and poems on the photographic prints. His work has been described as performative, narrative and illusionistic. More than a ‘photographer’, Michals enjoys being called a storyteller. 

Michals learned photography by himself after taking pictures on a trip to Russia in 1958. He started his professional career in fashion and commercial art in mid-century New York, extending into portraiture and video art. He has created commissioned portraits of many famous actors, writers, musicians, and visual artists from Andy Warhol to Meryl Streep, 125 of which are included in this exhibition. 

Michals relishes the challenge of distinguishing each person he photographs with a unique approach. He uses natural light and often shoots outside, working on the images with techniques such as multiple exposures, reflections, uncommon vantage points, hand painting and collage. Dreamlike and uncanny, his images tend to offer more questions than answers. “A great photo,” he says, “should never show you reality; it should contradict it.”

Duane Michals (b. 1932, McKeesport, PA) received a BA from the University of Denver in 1953 and worked as a graphic designer until his involvement with photography deepened in the late 1950s. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, hosted Michals’s first solo exhibition in 1970, and over the past five decades, his work has been exhibited worldwide and his contributions to photography have been recognised with several awards. Michals's work belongs to numerous permanent collections in the U.S. and abroad. He currently lives and works in New York City.

The exhibition is curated by Linda Benedict-Jones and traveled by Curatorial Exhibitions, Pasadena, California.