Duane Michals

 Duane Michals,

Today I will be discussing two sequential photographs of Duane Michals.

The two chosen photographs are the ones that caught my attention and have inspired me with the making of my own sequential photography.

                                                                     The human condition
                                                                   Source: Duane Michals

My thoughts about the photograph: 

The reason I have chosen to discuss this photograph is that it can have different meanings and inspirations to different people with different opinions. What I saw in this photograph was how deep our thoughts can go, it can go so far that we get zoned out and imagine things as if we're not present.

“The nature of consciousness is always the central question,” he asserted. In The Human Condition, his panel of six photographs from 1969 begins with a man standing on the 14th Street subway platform; the train arrives and he is bathed in a halo of light; the light becomes a swirl and in the last frame he is swept into a white disc the size of a galaxy passing through the night sky. From the immediate to the universal in six frames.

Death comes to the old lady

Source: Duane Michals

My thoughts about the photograph:

As the title itself is quoting already, the photograph is about the old lady her death. What I see is the angel of death visiting the lady and after that, we can see the lady vanish.

For this sequence, Michals enlisted his grandmother to animate his fascination with mortality, noting, “I am compulsive in my preoccupation with death. In some way, I am preparing myself for my own death.

What have the images given me:

The images have inspired me to work on a sequential image that makes us rethink the way we live our lives and what we are doing with it.

Reference

Philip Gefter. “Duane Michals Searches the Morgan and Finds Himself,” on The New York Times website Oct 29, 2019 [Online] Cited 14/11/2019

https://www.artic.edu/artworks/121129/death-comes-to-an-old-lady