Duane Michals: Impossible stories

Duane Michals is an American photographer, important for his innovative break with the ‘New Documentary’ approach that dominated photography in the late fifties and early sixties. He has continued to creatively oppose the problems he perceives in contemporary art. In the next issue I’ll discuss one of his recent creative statements, ‘Foto Follies: How Photography Lost its Virginity on the way to the Bank’. This week I want to think about one of the innovations that made his name early in his career.

The difference between Duane Michals and the ‘New Documentary Tradition’ can be thought of in terms of Michal’s own analogy: ‘Tradition’ for journalists, Michal’s for the short story. He wanted to use photography as an expressive medium, and saw fiction as a way to do this.

Many of his ‘story’ photographs are parts of sequences. The story is enacted and photographed, and these photographs (sometimes with captions) narrate the story. Time passes between each photograph, there are gaps in the narration: the story continues but we do not see what happened (we are either told or must work it out). Michals makes use of these gaps to narrate impossible occurrences in surreal stories, dreams and fantasies.

The impossible obviously cannot be photographed and so must be narrated in some other ways. Rather than editing the photographs to show the impossible event, Michal’s ‘impossible’ happens in the gaps between his photographs.

In ‘The Pleasures of the Glove’, a woman has her gloved hand on her hair. In the next picture the hand is that of the man next to her, but the glove is the same. The caption reads: “The hand in her glove became his glove”.

In the sequence of photographs, though, the continuity is already broken by the time gaps between images. We are used to the gaps in the sequence, so we don’t really notice them. When the change happens in one of these gaps it does not stand out, so what we see seems smooth and uninterrupted. Paradoxically, then, the effect is apparent continuity despite the fragmented medium.

It is with innovative yet remarkably simple techniques like this that Duane Michals made his photography fictional. In this way, Michals has opened photography’s potential for expression.