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Remembering Duane Michals
11 June 2026
Duane Michals, whose inspiration was the narratives of William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Cornell and René Magritte rather than the photographers who preceded him, died this week in Manhattan. He was 94.
He was born in McKeesport, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh. His father was a steelworker; his mother was a live-in domestic who saw her son and his brother only on weekends.
Michals showed an early interest in drawing nurtured by classes at the Carnegie Museum, which, in 1949 earned him a scholarship to study graphic design at the University of Denver. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1953, he enlisted, serving two years in Germany before moving to New York City in 1955 to work in publishing.
In 1958 he borrowed a camera to take on a trip to the Soviet Union and discovered photography. He began documenting what he saw. In 1965 that became Empty New York, a series on the city's streets, subways and shops during off hours.
But he soon lost interest in documentary photography. "To photograph reality," he said, "is to photograph nothing."
What instead?
In The Spirit Leaves the Body, he depicts in a sequence of six images a corpse laid out in a bare room with a ghosted image of the body rising and leaving the room.
His sequences, which often contained captions he wrote on the images, contained as few as four or as many as 30 images. Among the titles were Chance Meeting (1970), Take One and See Mt. Fujiyama (1975), The Return of the Prodigal Son (1982), Grandmother and Odette Visit the Park (1992) and The House I Once Called Home (2003).
He published over 25 books and exhibited at galleries regularly beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into his 90s. He had retrospectives at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh in 2014-15 and the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan in 2019.
He supported himself from the 1970s to the 1990s with both corporate commissions and celebrity portraits for Newsweek, Fortune and other magazines.
In 2015, we featured Michals in the Saturday matinee Duane Michals, the Man Who Invented Himself. The piece quotes him, "When I began to do sequences, it wasn't because I thought it was cool and the latest thing. I did it out of frustration with the still photograph."
He also left a little advice. "Pay attention while you're here, OK? Because it's going to go away. Just like yesterday did."
And just like Michals himself has.