Duane Michals

Duane Michals's intimate photographs picture his subjects in their natural environments. Michals began his career as a commercial photographer, and he continued to build on his experience with fashion magazines, as he frequently took portraits of the artists in his circle—Rene Magritte, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, and Balthus. Michals’s portraits often reference his subjects’ own work: his portrait of Joseph Cornell, for instance, sees the artist in a ghostly half profile as a result of a double exposure technique. Similarly, his portrait of Magritte has been doubled by the same process, the bowler-hatted artist imitating one of his own paintings. Michals's photographs often take on a sequential narrative and/or display aspects of the gay experience, all the while remaining mostly apolitical. Since the 1960s, Michals been recognized as an innovative and influential artist as well as a key influence on the work of artists such as Francesca Woodman and David Levinthal.

His work is included in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Moderna Musetet in Stockholm, the National Museum of Art in Kyoto, and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, among other public and private collections. His bibliography includes over ten monographs, including Photographs from the Floating World (Steidl, 2012), featuring his colorful Japanese-inspired images.