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Digital Camera World
Digital Camera World
Tom May

"To photograph reality is to photograph nothing": Duane Michals rejected the idea of the 'decisive moment' and did something wildly different

Duane Michals in 1992. (Photo by Marc GANTIER/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images).

Duane Michals, who died on June 09 in New York aged 94, was the kind of photographer who makes people uneasy. He wrote directly on his prints. He blurred things deliberately. He arranged images like comic strips and called them art.

When the street photographer Garry Winogrand saw Michals' first sequence show in the 1960s, he reportedly said: "What is this? This isn't photography." Michals would have taken that as a compliment.

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