Photographer Duane Michals was born into an odd sort of duality in 1932. He was raised in McKeesport, Penn., by devoutly Catholic parents of Czech origin (much like Andy Warhol, whom he would later depict in a series of blurred portraits). Michals' mother, worked as a housekeeper for a rich family, and gave her son the same name as her employer's son. The sensitive child was strongly intrigued by the presence of "the original Duane," but was never able to meet him; the employer's son committed suicide at a young age.
Some biographers contend that this background created an identity crisis for Michals. Indeed, as an artist, Michals has always played with the antipodal: life and death, sacred and profane, desire and impotence, visible and invisible, truth and falsity. Such things appear intertwined in his world like the two faces of Janus. They intersect on his black-and-white prints, producing sublimely strange dreams. It's not so surprising, then, to learn that Michals has always been fascinated by Belgian painter Rene Magritte, the great master of mirage. (Early in his career, Michals spent several months in Magritte's atelier taking portraits of the painter.)
The Duane Michals exhibition, currently at Shinjuku Odakyu Museum, is an impressive retrospective of this very unique American photographer. About 60 works (comprising 150 prints), from his earliest portraits of the '60s to recent works, have been assembled for the first time in Japan. In a video message, recorded for a New York retrospective in January, the photographer says, "I don't believe in appearances. And that makes me a very peculiar photographer. I believe in the mind, I believe in amazement."