Sequential images

 Duane Michals

Duane Michals

Duane Michals was born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, and after taking art classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, he attended the University of Denver, where he received his undergraduate degree in 1953. After his military service ended in 1956, Michals moved to New York where he studied at Parsons School of Design and worked as a graphic designer for Dance and Time. 

A three-week tour of Russia in 1958 with a camera borrowed from a friend marked the beginning of Michals' artistic career, although he still accepted commercial photography assignments. His Russian photographs are portraits, while his images from the mid-1960s catalogue deserted sites in New York. He began writing captions in the margins of his photographs in 1974, and incorporated painting into his treatment of the printed images in 1979.

Duane Michals's narrative pieces rely on the sequencing of multiple images to convey a sense of alienation and disequilibrium. In his world, the literal appearance of things is less important than the communication of a concept or story. In his portraiture, however, Michals relies wholly on his subjects' appearance and self-chosen poses to establish their identity; asserting that "we see what we want to see" and that photography is incapable of revealing a person's private nature, he eschews his usual interest in Surrealism, dreams, and nightmares in favor of a more direct approach.

“I don’t trust reality. So all of the writing on and painting on the photographs is born out of the frustration to express what you do not see.”

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Duane Michals

Sequential examples

The spirit leaves the body

In the late 1960s Michals began creating narrative sequences of staged photographs that imaginatively tackle metaphysical themes such as memory, desire, and mortality. “I believe in the imagination,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1976 book, Real Dreams.

“What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.” In The Spirit Leaves the Body, Michals summons a ghostly apparition by means of double exposure, reviving the ethereal iconography of nineteenth-century spirit photography in a new poetic context.

Death comes to an Old lady

Unlike the narrative sequence of a film, these images are open to individual interpretation and yield no overarching storyline. For this sequence, Michals enlisted his grandmother to animate his fascination with mortality, noting, “I am compulsive in my preoccupation with death. In some way, I am preparing myself for my own death."

My Sequential Images

"Get up before it's too late" is my image sequence creation. To have this final result, I worked in a closed place and tried to play with the shadows. For that I used a lamp behind the character to create a shadow efect. This happens if you focus the camera on the light so, we can only see the silhouette shown.

The real meanings of this sequence is, as you can see in the title, the concept of raising in all the obstacles of our life. We can see the character's head raising up, like she had gained the courage to rise and was ready to do anything.

Photoshop process