Duane Micheals

Photography Beyond Photography

A philosopher as well as a poet and photographer, Michals questions our reality through deceptively simple images that stay in our mind as our brains keeps trying to process the message that we are receiving. This message comes back to us at different points in our lives as we are reliving certain key moments that make us see that first reality as a new reality thus reorganizing our thoughts and our beliefs.

Alice Mirror 1974

Michals developed the use of photo sequences, a sort of story telling through images which became his signature. THE HUMAN CONDITION deals with life and death and our existence within the Cosmos. The mirror, a metaphor for reality, is the subject of ALICE'S MIRROR, where a series of realities and mirrors appear to question our straight forward approach to life. 

I find that with looking at Duane Michals work in a series it draws me away from the first image, the first image makes you think that it is quite surreal but as the image zooms out to the next image and the next you see that the set is kind of pushing you away from the first image

 Things are Queer, 1993

Returning to Duane Michals's remarkable series of photographs, things are queer, not only because the world cannot be known and all representations are fallible, but because of the transforming process of art itself. In Michals's beautiful photographs, queerness becomes an ideal; the circularity of the series suggests that the image is inexhaustible and unknowable. But in the end, art's pleasures, its humor and mystery, do help us know the world in all its queerness.

khttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zFI_j3E2nk

The things that are queer series is a great exampal of a circaler narrative were the first image is the beginning and the end of the narrative.