Duane Michals, the Thought Hunter

"I believe in the invisible. I do not believe in the visible." These are the words of Duane Michals (McKeesport, Pennsylvania, 1932) who, at 93, continues to adhere to this principle to create the surreal photos and videos that have made him a thought hunter and a living legend in the craft of seeing. More with the mind than with the eye, in his case. Ironic and reflective, he continues to play "without rules" and marry image and word. This is evidenced by the exhibition 'Duane Michals. The Photographer of the Invisible' that the Canal Foundation and PHotoEspaña dedicate to him until August 24 in Madrid.

Michals is not interested "at all" in reality. He prefers to live in "an unreal world" which he finds "more stimulating." "For me, reality lies in intuition, fantasy, and that little voice in my head that says: isn't this extraordinary?" he asserts. "When you look at my photographs, you are looking at my thoughts," claims this philosopher of images. He unveils a universe where the boundaries between the real and the dreamed blur, turning photography into a space of introspection, play, and philosophical inquiry.

He is one of the great innovators of photographic language and a reference in the avant-garde with profound influence. A precursor of conceptual photography, he changed the paradigm in the 1960s by choosing to photograph "the invisible," capturing his thoughts instead of scenes from reality. He brought narrative sequences and phototext to photography, representing abstract concepts such as spirituality, the passage of time, death, love, and the self.

Self-taught and iconoclastic, he thus shattered the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words. Trained in Fine Arts, his references are not photographers but painters like De Chirico, Balthus, or Magritte, the Belgian master of surrealism who "liberated" him from conventions about what a photo should be.

Enrica Viganò curated the exhibition in close collaboration with Michals himself. They selected 51 works composed of 150 photos spanning six decades, from 1964 to today, including a sequence from this year. "Michals' conceptual photography was subversive when photojournalism was triumphant sixty years ago," notes Viganò.

His daring and narrative images, sequenced like frames of a film, "were a scandal in their time, which worsened when he began writing on photographic paper around the snapshot with his unique handwriting." "He challenges the documentary canon by focusing on the emotional, the metaphysical, and the poetic, placing his photography closer to cinema or literature than to the photojournalistic tradition," adds the curator.

Experimental, lyrical, and unclassifiable, his unique vision spans from quantum physics—for a Vogue commission dealing with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle—to the recreation of 'Alice's Mirror,' in a play with perception and logic that challenges our understanding of reality through the work of Lewis Carroll.

The exhibition includes some of his most iconic sequences, such as 'Casual Encounter' (1970) or 'Things Are Queer' (1973), which reveal moments of transformation or inexplicable recognition. Photographic sequences allow capturing the evolution of an internal experience that escapes verbal language.

As a portraitist, he "explores" the person portrayed, in what he calls "prose portraits" arising from dialogue, context, and the atmosphere of the moment. More than portraits 'of,' they are 'about' a person. They range from those of very close friends like Andy Warhol, to René Magritte or Marcel Duchamp, and figures like Pasolini, Tilda Swinton, or Grace Coddington, as well as several ironic and emotional recent self-portraits in color.

With a setup articulated around light boxes, the small format of Michals' black and white photos requires close viewing in six sections linked to key concepts in his work: Imagination, Visualization, Sensation, Intuition, Indignation, and Revelation. The small size of the photos seeks "to create intimacy with the viewer against the spectacle of large prints," according to Viganò. It also aims "to provoke reflection and emotion on some of his recurring themes, such as the human condition, spirituality, death, dreams, or fear."

It concludes with a set of five short autobiographical videos shot a few months ago, in which Michals reflects on time, memory, identity, and death in a very intimate way. In the series 'The House I Once Called Home,' he shares family secrets. He returns to his childhood home and overlays current photos with images from his childhood in an aesthetic and therapeutic exercise. In handwritten texts, he recounts how his mother would leave him sitting in a chair in a clothing store and say "stay here, I'll be right back," generating long minutes of anguish. Michals notes that God left him on this planet in 1932 "and has forgotten me. He has abandoned me. He will never return."