©Duane Michals, Self Portrait As If I Were Dead, 

I first learned of Duane Michals, like many, in a history of photography course in college. Squished between formalist foundations and the radical love of Nan Goldin was Michals. I still remember seeing his photographic sequences of angels leading a figure away from their deceased body for the first time on a murky projector in a lecture hall. I had just lost my father to suicide that year, and Michals’ narrative work on death was a beautifully imaginative reflection of how I hoped death would feel for my father. It wasn’t an answer, but an open-ended speculation infused with religion, dreams, and the potential for death to be lovely in its mysteries.

Michals is a north star for artists because of the tightrope he walks between existential wonder, impish humor, and invention that is rich with the dilemmas of living, dying, and the daydreams looming in between. I illegally downloaded and printed an image of Michals offline and hung it on my dorm room wall, and looked at the photo every day. When young artists find their heroes, they start by copying their work, then sink further into the alchemies of the artist’s ideas.  I started to create long-exposure self portraits inspired by the mysticism of Michals. Like many young artists, I thought about death and dying and the weird ways the world worked. It’s astounding how photographs taken over forty years ago still ring like a bell.

©Duane Michals, The Fallen Angel, 1968

Michals worked right up until his death this June at the age of 94. “You get two choices: doing and bullshit. Most people bullshit, but I was a doer,” says Michals in an interview that should be the mantra for every person navigating how to be an artist. Everything is confusing. The internet is annoying, and every day sinks lower into a new layer of purgatory. Michals never attended school for photography, and his self-taught methods of photographing and writing directly on photographs feel especially powerful in their ability to beckon a viewer to really sit and look him in the eyes. Photography is often thought of as proof, but Michals interrupted that certainty with his own written voice. The photograph alone was never enough. The handwriting asks to be read. He wanted to confess, speculate, and occasionally contradict what the camera had shown.

I feel like Michals has more answers to life’s questions than he let on. Every time I return to a work by Michals, I feel something new, and I want to know more. Maybe that is because, as you grow older and gain different experiences in your life, you see a new dilemma within yourself inside of his images. Michals was raised Catholic, and like many (including myself), left that behind as he got older. The images and narratives of Christianity linger in his work as another story that asks questions about living and dying, but not deliver an answer. There is a vibration to the questions asked by Michals in his work, like how beautiful it would be if we actually were plucked by an angel when we die and go somewhere else beyond our comprehension.

©Duane Michals, Death Comes to the Old Lady (detail), 1969

©Duane Michals, Paradise Regained, 1968

In the interviews and talks I have watched online, Michals appears to be an artist whose ego never consumed his work or subjects. His playfulness and devotional creative practice exemplify an artist truly doing whatever he wanted to do. Michals was known to be exuberant in his presence and focused within his artmaking. He had a sharpness of heart that reminds me of artists like Susan Rothenberg and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, who I also admire dearly. They proudly wear their beating hearts both on their sleeves and steep that spirit of living into their artwork. It is a passion and charm that cannot be taught in school, one that seems to rival obsession: the lifelong pursuit of an individualized visual language assembled from the ground up. Michals fabricated time machines through his photographs, laughed at death, and celebrated queer sexuality before it was widely visible in culture. His work emerged before much contemporary language around identity and queerness existed, yet it remains poignant because her approached sexuality with curiosity rather than certainty.

When I first encountered Michals, I was grieving. I still don’t know what happens after death. Michals didn’t know either, but what he offered was something more generous than certainty. He offered the possibility that unknown itself could be beautiful. Michals is beloved by artists and admirers for his ineffable ability to make the invisible visible, giving form to mortality, desire, and imagination. As he once said, “There has to be magic, I don’t want facts.” Even though I never met Michals, I feel like I know him in some way through his work, and I learned parts of myself through his work, for which I am grateful. I still have the printed photos of his work hanging on my studio wall to this day.

©Duane Michals, self-portrait, 2024

©Duane Michals, The Illuminated Man, 1968

©Richard Renaldi, portrait of Duane Michals

Duane Michals’  full obituary in the New York Times.

Douglas Breault is an interdisciplinary artist who overlaps elements of photography, painting, sculpture, and video. His work has been collected, published, and exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the MFA Boston, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (South Korea), Space Place Gallery (Russia), the Bristol Art Museum, and the Rochester Museum of Fine Arts. In addition to being an artist, Breault writes about art, curates exhibitions, and teaches photography at different colleges.

Follow Douglas Breault on Instagram: @dug_bro