NEW YORK, NY.- DC Moore Gallery announced that Duane Michals passed away on June 9, 2026. He was 94 years old.

One of the most influential photographic innovators of the 20th century, Michals is widely celebrated for his work with sequences, multiple exposures, and text. Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s "decisive moment,” Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. Rather than seeking to reproduce reality, he was interested in the expression of interior worlds, dreams, and metaphysical questions. He began staging photograph sequences, appropriating cinema’s frame-by-frame format.

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Michals also incorporated text as a key component in his works, writing directly on the printed photograph. Rather than serving a didactic or explanatory function, his handwritten text adds another dimension to the images’ meaning and gives voice to Michals’s singular musings, which are poetic, tragic, and humorous, often all at once.

Throughout his career, Michals continued to push the boundaries of photography, incorporating painting, collage, sculpture, and film into his practice. His restless curiosity pushed him to innovate and surprise, as the artist said, “The focus changes constantly. And the more it changes and the older I get, the less sure I am about everything and the less I seem to know. I seem to ask more and more questions. I’m completely bewildered. That also is a kind of wisdom, allowing oneself to unlearn. My work is about the absurdity of this condition.”

Duane Michals was born in 1932 in McKeesport, PA, a steel manufacturing suburb of Pittsburgh. He left in 1949 to attend the University of Denver, where he graduated with a degree in graphic design. After spending two years in the US Army stationed in Baumholder, Germany, he moved to New York City in the mid 1950s, where he remained for the rest of his life. Although he never left New York, the city of McKeesport and memories of his youth remained a source of inspiration throughout his career.

In 1958, Michals traveled to the USSR with a borrowed camera and first discovered his love for photography, taking portraits of locals he met along his journey. After returning to New York, he began working as a photographer and had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Underground Gallery. Michals met architect Frederick Gorrée (1931-2017) in 1960, who became his lifelong partner. They married fifty-one years later, in 2011.

In 1964, Michals created his acclaimed Empty New York series. Inspired by the work of Eugène Atget, he would wander the streets of New York early on Sunday mornings, considering the empty subway cars, storefronts, and diners as stage sets. This mode of looking at scenes of everyday life as theater inspired Michals to begin staging his own photographic dramas.

In the later 1960s, Michals created some of his first photographic sequences, including The Woman is Frightened by a Door (1966), Paradise Regained, The Fallen Angel, and The Spirit Leaves the Body (all 1968). He also began hand-writing poetic or witty messages on his prints, such as This Photograph is My Proof (1967). Both of these innovations were radical within the established norms of fine art and documentary photography, for their disruption of the photographic print as an object and the conceit of photography as a means of representing truth. For Michals, truth lies not in observable conditions, but in asking questions of ourselves and our perceived reality. As Max Kozloff and other art historians have observed, the act of writing introduces another record in addition to the photograph. These dual forms of narrative can be symbiotic, or they can contradict each other, suggesting an unreliability.

Michals’s formal techniques draw on the legacies of surrealism; events take place in time that might jump forward and back, or double back on itself. As A.D. Coleman wrote in a review of Michals’s 1970 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, “while the events recorded by Michals’s camera have the clarity of hallucinations and the factuality of dreams, they are, like all visions, so shot through with the sense of otherness that a literal reading does not even touch on their true meaning.”

In 1965, Michals traveled to Brussels to visit the home of René Magritte, whom he greatly admired. Despite not speaking the same language, Michals spent five days with Magritte, making numerous portraits which were later published in the book, A Visit with Magritte, in 1981. Using multiple exposures and other techniques to perplex the eye, the portraits convey the two artists’ shared surrealist humor.

Throughout his career, Michals would continue to seek out his own artistic heroes and take their portraits. Often on assignment, he photographed artists of all kinds–– photographers, painters, actors, authors, directors–– and developed what he called the “prose portrait.” In these portraits, Michals reveals the aura of the sitter’s identity, channeling elements of their personality and artistic style while maintaining his own vision.

Beyond portraiture, Michals created several bodies of work informed by fellow artists and writers. His homages to figures including James Joyce, Walt Whitman, and C.P. Cavafy illuminate the intrinsically literary qualities of his work and his interest in the possibilities of language. Rather than illustrating the words of other writers, these works explore shared themes of desire, homoeroticism, spirituality, death, and memory.

Michals continued to push the boundaries of the photographic image, adding oil paint to his own gelatin silver prints, and later, painting on found tintypes from the 19th century. Rather than adhere to any particular medium, he considered himself an “expressionist,” choosing his mode of expression according to his needs. In the 2010s, he began experimenting with film and sculpture. His films often incorporate elements from other media, drawing from the cinematic qualities always present in his work and witty or surreal use of props and text. He has made over 100 short films, which are available to view freely on his Vimeo page.

In 2025, Duane Michals created “What Are Dreams,” a short film and photo series with Jacob Elordi for Bottega Veneta, based on a 1994 photograph and text by Michals. Among his other collaborations with fashion houses, he also recently shot portfolios for two collections with Loewe, in 2018 and 2019.

Over the past five decades, Michals’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, hosted Michals’s first solo exhibition (1970). More recently, he has had one-person shows at the Odakyu Museum, Tokyo (1999), and at the International Center of Photography, New York (2005). In 2008, Michals celebrated his 50th anniversary as a photographer with a retrospective exhibition at the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, Greece and the Scavi Scaligeri in Verona, Italy. In 2015 The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA held a major retrospective of the artist’s work titled Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals. Fundación Mapfre in Barcelona, Spain opened Duane Michals in 2017. In 2019, The Morgan Library and Museum in New York exhibited a career retrospective of Michals' work, The Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan. The touring exhibition, Duane Michals: The Portraitist, originated at DC Moore Gallery in 2015 and traveled to The Crocker Museum of Art, Sacramento, CA (2018-2019), The Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY (2019), The Lowe Art Museum, Miami, FL (2021), Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Sweden (2022), University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, VA (2022), and The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finland (2023). Duane Michals: Photographer of the Invisible originated at the Fundación Canal, Madrid, Spain in 2025, and traveled to Spazio Reale, Monte Carasso, Switzerland in 2026. DC Moore Gallery has presented 8 solo exhibitions of his work since 2013.

In recognition of his contributions to photography, Michals has been honored with a CAPS Grant (1975), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1976), the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Art (1989), the Foto España International Award (2001), and the Cultural Award from the German Photographic Society (2017).

Michals's work belongs to numerous permanent collections in the U.S. and abroad, including the Art Institute of Chicago; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Auckland; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; and Philadelphia Museum of Art. Michals's archive is housed at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Over forty monographs of Michals's work have been published, including Homage to Cavafy (1978); Nature of Desire (1989); Duane Michals: Now Becoming Then (1990); Salute, Walt Whitman (1996); The Essential Duane Michals (1997); Questions Without Answers (2001); The House I Once Called Home (2003); Foto Follies / How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank (2006); Storyteller: Duane Michals (2014); Duane Michals: Empty New York (2018); and Texas (2022).



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