Duane Michals (b. 1932, McKeesport, PA)

Duane Michals received a BA from the University of Denver in 1953. He served in the army until 1956, after which he moved to New York and began studying at Parsons while also working as a graphic designer for Dance and Time magazines. He began to make photographs in 1958 while traveling in the Soviet Union. It was with these pictures that Michals made his first book—three versions, each with a different cover—the start of a lifelong love of the dialogue between camera and printed page.

Michals first made significant strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. These sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals also incorporated text as a key component in his works. Rather than serving a didactic or explanatory function, his handwritten text adds another dimension to the images’ meaning and gives voice to Michals’ singular musings, which are poetic, tragic, and humorous, often all at once.

Michals's work belongs to numerous permanent collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Michals's archive is housed at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Michals lives and works in New York City.