I’ve heard of his name but don’t recall much about his work until Alice showed us some of the photos and art he’d produced. First photograph we were shown was “Self portrait as if I were dead 1968.”<\/strong> and the question was asked of the group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does this photograph suggest about Michals and his work? <\/strong>My initial thoughts spilled onto the iPad screen as follows after considering the photograph using the analysis tools we’ve been using in semester one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Who<\/strong>. Artist appears twice as if looking over his own corpse, wearing all black as if to appear like yin\/yang opposite of naked skin under the creased bedsheet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What<\/strong>. Artist lying corpse like on a table, under a sheet, but not a hospital table looks like a dining table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking down on him with his arms crossed as if disappointed that it\u2019s come to this. Or he hasn\u2019t made enough of his life etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where<\/strong>. Looks like it was at home and not in a studio<\/p>\n\n\n\n How<\/strong>. Double exposure as you can see the skirting\u00a0 through the sheet hanging down off the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why<\/strong>. Interested in opposites, life\/death, black\/white, upright\/horizontal. possibly a technical exercise of double exposures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alice also mentioned that it is unusual to hand write onto print. This additional text is an important part of Michals’ practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anti-traditionalist, Uses text and says that he likes to “photographs things we cannot see”. Some themes throughout his catalogue feature homosexuality, mortality and family<\/p>\n\n\n\n “He doesn\u2019t believe in the eyes he believes in the mind”. Linda Benedict Jones<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why is Michals important as a photographer\/artist ?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Will change photography to do what he wants and thinks of himself as an artist not a photographer<\/p>\n\n\n\n Blurring, double exposure,mirror images were something he renewed. Going against the purists thinking that these effects were the result of mistakes in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Created “photo-stories” in 1974 and set up narratives along with his photographs by using the accompanying text. Often the text did not relate directly to the contents of the image but added context to it, controlling how the viewer reads the image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Didn\u2019t follow ideas of \u201cgood\u201dphotography and thought that rules were made to be avoided so experimented with various techniques as discussed above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Michals used sequences a lot in his work, do we know what a sequence actually is? <\/p>\n\n\n\n The definition that Alice gave us is “Related events movements or items that follow each other”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reminiscent of frame by frame format of cinema or the storyboards that movie makers use to tell the story before it gets captured on film or digital sensor. It is successive motion<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alice then shared another of Michals’ sequences an excerpt from “The house I once called home” 2003<\/p>\n\n\n\n My initial thoughts when looking at the image:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Talking with the group other words came up that made sense. Memory, recollections, flashback, I hadn’t noticed there was an older gent in the top image of the three but it was apparently Michal’s recreating his pose for the original photo when he was younger, outside the, then tidier, family house. In the top picture you can see it’s unkempt and the growth of the flora is untidy while in the bottom one it’s considerably more manicured. The centre image is a combination of the two wither by layering negatives, double exposing paper or digital manipulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is meant by the term narrative ?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Alice then gave us a handout where Michals talks about fate and chance all resulting in Andy\u2019s photo. (The bottom family photo taken by Andy) It\u2019s fossilised he tells us in language that is poetic, spiritual and also scientific. He has handwritten the text also, as is usual for him and this connects us directly to the writer, rather than it being typewritten or printed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next up was another photograph from Michals. “A letter from my father” from 1960<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Alice removed any text written on the print so that we could interpret the photo. The Mum and Dad characters in the image look expectant as though waiting for their son to finally fly the nest or go to college. Or they even might be kicking him out due to an argument or disagreement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Father clearly in focus whilst young man in front is out of focus but still easy to read expression which looks determined yet sad. The father has hands on hips in an aggressive stance whilst the mother is in the dark as if not very influential and takes up very little room in the image. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Michals is quoted as saying. \u201cA photograph of my parents or my father doesn\u2019t tell me for a second what I thought of my father, which for me is more important than what the man looks like. So then I had to evolve into writing. Not that writing actually describes what you are looking at, but to actually talk about what you can\u2019t see.\u201d This is his way of saying the text on the image about a letter that his father never sent him might have contained some mysterious secret or even where his love had been hidden. The text wasn’t about the image but the people in the image. This helps us paint a picture of the subjects using triangulation of a picture, an example of the persons personality and we join them together to interpret the image as it’s intended.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n What do I think Surreal means?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dreamlike, unusual,<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The definition Alice gave us: Strange, not seeming real;like a dream<\/p>\n\n\n\n Michals was influenced by surrealism and in particular Balthasar, Magritte and de Chirico<\/p>\n\n\n\n We looked at two de Chirico Paintings from the early 20th Century and examined them for things that we noticed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anxious Journey, Paris<\/strong>, 1913<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Song Of Love, Paris<\/strong>, 1914<\/p>\n\n\n\n These types of works were inspirational to Michals and he sought to recreate the effects by using photography like double exposures and weird perspectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another Surrealist artist that inspired Michals was Rene Magritte<\/strong>, we looked at the painting “The Son Of Man” <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I spent some time last year looking at this image as part of the Studio recreation assignment so I kept my mouth shut and let everyone else come up with what they saw. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My list included:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Alice pointed out that you could see some of his face over the apple, and that the arm on the right of the frame looks like it belongs to someone facing away from the viewer, into the image. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We watched a brief video on the Philosophy behind Magritte’s art.<\/a> which helps us understand the meaning of the painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Duane michals made portrait photographs of Magritte and de Chirico as he sought them out and his photos were a mixture of double exposures and hidden identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Time for another handout, this time it was about Surreal Narratives..<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201dThings are queer\u201d by Duane Michals was a sequence of nine images that tell a story. What do we make of it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Michals uses perspective to fool the viewer as to the scale of the image in the top left image. Then a larger single leg appears, (where is the left leg?) to tell us the scale is off. It then develops into a story of a man standing in a shop window in a miniature bathroom suite whose photograph is in a book being read in an alleyway which in turn is the subject of a photograph that hangs above the sink in the initial image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This reminds me of something I’ve seen at the photography show last year in a presentation by John Humphrey (photographer) who discussed the Droste Effect<\/a> in which the subject of an image is included in the image, this might be worth taking a picture of for the week challenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My notes on Michals’ sequence were: <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bobgriffithsphoto.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/image-1-1024x815.png\")
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(http:\/\/www.dshed.net\/digitised\/reveal\/resources\/case_study_duane.html)<\/p>\n\n\n\nSurreal<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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