Duane Michals
(1932 - living) U.S.A.
Photographer
Born at McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Descended from Czech immigrants, his father was a steel worker, and his mother was a live-in maid. At the age of 14 Duane Michals entered a drawing contest and won a scholarship to attend Saturday watercolour classes in Pittsburgh.
At the age of 17 he saved up five dollars from his paper round to buy his first volume of poetry, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass which left an indelible impression on him.
"He spoke to me directly and he spoke with a great vitality and a great openness and honesty. Also, at that point, being a gay person, I began to identify with what he was talking about. It was a revelation."
 He took his first job at Dance Magazine as assistant art director. In 1958 he visited Russia with a borrowed camera and he began to take an interest in photography.
By 1961 he was working for Esquire and Mademoiselle. He covered the filming of The Great Gatsby for American Vogue. He photographed the 1968 Olympics for the Mexican government. He produced photographs for the covers of magazines including Life. He did the photography for the Synchronicity album for The Police. He worked on advertising campaigns for various companies including Elizabeth Arden, Revlon, and the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly.
He brought in two innovations in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He told stories using a series of photographs he called "Sequences". In 1974 he added another new device by becoming the first photographer to write on his pictures.
In 1995 he published his homage to Walt Whitman entitled Salute, Walt Whitman consisting of compositions of Adonis photographed near Duane Michal's house in upstate New York. The photographs went on show for the first time in the UK at Hamiltons Gallery in London in September 1999.
Work:
- Album: The Portraits of Duane Michals 1958-1988 (1988)
- Eros & Thanatos (1992)
- Michals Duane - Upside Down Inside Out And Backwards (1993)
- Salute, Walt Whitman (1996)
Excerpts from: The Knitting Circle, U.K. - http://www.sbu.ac.uk/stafflag/people.html - et alii
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