Duane Michals obituary
Photographer whose posed subjects and double exposures were inspired by surrealism and his Catholic upbringing
Duane Michals, who has died aged 94, was a pioneer of the “directorial mode” of photography, known for staging his tableaux and for posing his subjects in a range of roles from an angel to an everyman. The results were a mixture of the profound, the profane and the puckish, tilting at issues of life and death. As Michals was fond of saying: “I think that if you’re a very serious person, it’s very important to be very silly.”
He was inspired by imagery from his Catholic childhood and by surrealism. In Paradise Regained (1968), a man and woman in a sitting room are gradually, in a series of six photographs, divested of all their clothes and possessions (save a clock), as their room becomes filled with pot plants. This Garden of Eden-cum-garden centre is typical of his wit and wisdom, with the plodding story-boarding and seemingly profound engagement offering a sort of “photo-cartoon” philosophical inquiry.
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