Why Duane Michals’s beautiful fictions matter more than facts.

Faysal Zaman | Bangla Outlook | 13th June 2026

Michals entered photography when it was dominated by the documentary approach of Arbus and others. His “wildly inventive” approach, such as multi-image sequences and writing on his images, caused a stir. Conceptual or surrealist theme evidents in his work owed much to Atget’s famous images of empty Parisian streets “In his hands, the camera stopped acting as an instrument of empirical verification and became a vehicle for the interior life”.  Says one writer, “an artist of serious consequence”.