Duane Michals

Duane Michals (1932-2026) was initially inspired by photojournalism as a means of communicating narratives; eventually developing a process that organized his photographs in a frame-by-frame sequence above handwritten text. He graduated from the University of Denver in 1953 and studied at Parsons School of Design after the end of his miliary service in 1956.

Who is Sidney Sherman is a series of six gelatin silver prints, that poke holes in the celebrity-centered and self-satisfied notions of the commercial art world: Michals’ photographic self-portrait in disguise offers less-glamorous imagery than the voluminous self-portraiture of 1980’s art-star photographer Cindy Sherman. Scrawled texts below each image mimic the writings of French philosopher Derrida and make fun of the dense, alienating postmodernist language that has for decades shaped academic prescriptives about how to talk about art.