Duane Michals – Jennifer Couëlle

This article was originally published only in French. No translation is available


Summary
We think of him when we think of photographic mise en scène – and of narrative sequences, and of the integration of hand­writing into photographs. When Duane Michals made his first photographic fictions in the mid-sixties, the practice was not entirely without precedent. Hippolyte Bayard’s Autoportrait en noyé dates back to 1840; then, there were the metaphoric experiments of futurist, surrealist, and Bauhaus photography, Moholy-Nagy’s “productive creativity,” and so on. True, but it was following Michals’s first black-and-white still-lives that the fabricated image began to be established as a trend. Translated by Käthe Roth