Duane Michals

In this film, photographer Duane Michals engagingly discusses issues over the span of his legendary and influential career, crossing the boundaries between photography and philosophy. Unlike many of his contemporaries who fixate on manufactured ideas of what is true and real in the world, Michals delves deep into the unconscious mind to find lasting meaning in his life and his art, creating a body of work that is unique in the field of photography.

Michals is not just an amazing photographer, he is a true original. He became a photographer as a matter of need. For him it was always a matter of need, and all his best impulses grew out of the need to express something. “The keyword is having something to express,” says Michals. “When you look at my photographs you are looking into my mind.”

Michals has followed an undeterred path to success that began with a degree from the University of Denver in 1953. After serving in the army he trained as a graphic designer at the Parsons School of Design and later worked for Dance Magazine, Time, and other periodicals of the time.

What Michals loves about photography is the sense of invention. To him photography by and large is an art, but to be considered a minor art because as practiced by most photographers, it lacks the essential ingredient of all major art, total invention.

Michals does not become a photographer the moment he picks up the camera. When he picks one up, the hard work's already been done. The hard part for him is what his thoughts are, what does he care enough about to do a photograph? Michals feels life is too short to be distracted by the pesky, mundane questions that plague most photographers: "How can I get this model to smile without showing her teeth?" or, "Does this house look better with or without the little red wagon in front?" So think hard, think deep and ask new questions. As a photographer, how can you present the nature of existence and the drama of the human condition? How will you define beauty and ugliness in visual terms? What is death and why is mankind fixated on rational explanations of the afterlife.
When people ask me what I am, I tell them I'm the artist formally known as a photographer," says Michals when describing his creative position in life. "I am an expressionist and by that I mean I'm not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs."

According to Michals, to illustrate grief by taking a picture of a woman crying does not aid the observer in understanding it is truly like to experience deep sadness. Instead, the photographer must help the viewer feel what the woman feels by tracing the woman's pain with photographs, text, icons, or anything else that that brings the audience closer to the actual experience. "It's the difference between reading a hundred love stories and actually falling in love," he emphasizes.

It is challenging enough to derive meaning form the art of photography when the artist is concerned with the rational literal observation of the world. It is more difficult when the artist moves beyond mere observation and into the realm of his thoughts and translates his muse into film.

The way he captions his images and the way he writes about them is all fictional and out of his imagination. Michals believes in imagination, he loves wit, and surprise. He deals with issues that essentially aren't visible. Michals is much more interested in what something feels like rather than what it looks like. So if he sees a woman crying, he’d much rather “feel” a woman crying, and feel the reason of her grief, and give his viewers an experience of what it feels like to cry.

With age Michals has become more intimate and small things have taken on more meaning. Is Michals a photographer? A philosopher? A writer? Or is he all of the above? One thing for sure is that for him, a photograph is the intricate framework of a thought from which the image takes on a life of its own.