Gallery of Photography was delighted to bring the work of world-renowned American photographer Duane Michals to Ireland.
Michals, convinced that photography cannot represent reality, dwells on the invisible: dream, loss, death, myth, spirit. Most urgently, he has sought to undermine accepted complacencies, to pose, if not necessarily to answer, questions about the nature of reality, photography and art. He strains against both the conventions and limitations of the medium. Chaffing at photography’s restrictions, Michals began making multiple exposure portraits and single images and sequences that tell peculiar little stories.
A kind of relentless ordinariness clings to Michal’s photographs. They are simply composed in unexceptional domestic settings or bare interiors. Into this commonplace, the extraordinary steps unannounced, as myth, guilt and philosophical conundrum take awkward and compelling shape on photographic paper.