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• Issue #281
• Article

By Stephen Perloff
Editor of The Photograph Collector and Photo Review

Duane Michals, Self-portrait, 2025. (Courtesy DC Moore Gallery) © Duane Michals

Duane Michals’ spirit left his body on June 9 in NYC. One of the most important and influential photographers of the past century, Duane was an iconoclast, provocateur, and innovator first class—and a wonderful, playful, and warm-hearted human being.

Back when the single black-and-white image captured from the observable world reigned supreme, Duane embraced what A.D. Coleman dubbed the Directorial Mode, setting up his mise en scene. He introduced sequences of images that told a story, then added text hand-written on the print. He used multiple exposures and photomontage; painted on images by Atget and Ansel Adams and his own; made portraits that captured the essence of sitters from René Magritte and Joseph Cornell, to Tilda Swinton; painted on large-format tintypes—and that's just scratching the surface.

I first met Duane at a workshop at the Photography Place in the Philadelphia suburbs in 1976. He needed a ride back to the train at 30th Street Station and I volunteered. That began a very cordial relationship that lasted till now.

I photographed Duane numerous times over the years. In 1981 he came to Philadelphia for a talk and a fashion show at Wanamakers to benefit the Philadelphia College of Art. At one point I got him to dance with me at the party.

I am proud to say that we were the first American periodical (The Photo Review) to publish his sequence Christ in New York when no one else would touch it amidst the culture wars back then. And I believe we were the first and certainly one of the few periodicals to review his book Homage to Cavafy.

Duane's mother had moved to Philadelphia and I picked him up at the train station and took him out to Chestnut Hill to visit her. Duane used this portrait in his retrospective at the Carnegie in Pittsburgh and included it in the catalog.

I included Duane's work in the exhibition I curated at Rowan University, Extended Realities: The Language of Photomontage, in 2013. And I organized a public lecture for Duane open to the public - and an overflow crowd—at the University of Pennsylvania that year.

I used to attend the exhibitions Duane had every other year at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City. I certainly didn't make all of Duane's many shows but I did make a number of them.

In the past few years we noted a number of Duane's short films in The Photo Review Newsletter, both some of his madcap adventures and his insightful discussions of how some of his most well-known photographs came together.

Duane was one of a kind. His images will live on, but the world will be a lesser place for his absence.

My thanks to Steve Perloff and The Photograph Collector Newsletter for giving me permission to use this information. The Photograph Collector, which is a wonderful newsletter that I can heartily recommend, is published monthly and is available by subscription for $149.95. You can phone 1-215-891-0214 and charge your subscription or send a check or money order to: The Photograph Collector, 340 East Maple Ave., Suite 200, Langhorne, PA 19047. Or to order The Photograph Collector Newsletter online, go to: https://photoreview.org/publications/the-photograph-collector/.