Duane Michals

Duane Michals is an American photographer born February 18 1932. He is an artist known for creating sequential images, a collection of images that depict a scene. I will be discussing two of his works, one of which inspired a previous work of mine: "Consumption".

I will first discuss "Chance Meeting", made in the 1970s.

This piece shows two men walking past each other in an alley. The bespectacled older man watches the other cautiously as he passes by when, in the final picture, the other man looks back. According to Duane Michals, this piece is showing what it is like to be homosexual in a homophobic world in the 70s, displaying this with the cautious nature of the two men as either one, or both, could be homosexual and showing varying degrees of caution. Duane Michals is homosexual and some of his works have the theme of homosexuality, but in a more subtle way than most other works of media with the theme.

The second piece I will be discussing is "The Dream of Flowers", made in the 1980s.

This piece shows flowers growing over a man resting his head on a glass surface, most likely a table. Although not shown here in this compiled image, the individual images were lettered with different letters to spell "AIDS". With this context, the man may be dead or dying and his body is giving life to flowers as he dies. The flowers themselves give a funerary theme to the image. The AIDS theme was chosen because this piece was created in the AIDS crisis in the 80s when several gay men were discovered to have been infected with AIDS, increasing homophobia at the time.

References
- Artist image: http://adcglobal.org/hall-of-fame/duane-michals/
- Chance Meeting research: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/arts/design/duane-michals-prepares-for-his-retrospective.html
- The Dream of Flowers research: https://www.mfah.org/art/detail/16563?returnUrl=%2Fart%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dchasanoff%26show%3D30