ABCDuane: A Duane Michals Primer

Somewhere around the letter F, in an entry that could be for father or fear or fallen angel, it becomes clear that this alphabet is a seance. Filing systems do not raise the dead. Duane Michals has spent sixty years insisting that photography's real subject is everything a camera cannot see, memory, longing, the dead, the joke God is playing, and ABCDuane hands that argument a structure loose enough to hold all of it at once.

Michals built his reputation against the documentary orthodoxy of his generation. While others chased the decisive moment on the street, he staged small metaphysical dramas in sequence, wrote in his own hand across the print, let a photograph tell a lie in order to reach a truth. The sequences, the handwritten texts, the double exposures of a ghost leaving a body: these were heresies in 1970 and are now part of the language every conceptual photographer speaks.

Anyone who has seen The Fallen Angel or Chance Meeting knows the method: a handful of frames, a small event, and a swerve into the metaphysical in the final image. This Photograph Is My Proof, a picture of two lovers annotated years later with the ache of what was lost, does in one frame what most photographers cannot manage in a career. ABCDuane is thick with that sensibility, pulling rarely seen work alongside the signatures, and the alphabet keeps reintroducing it from odd angles.

The handwriting is not decoration. He began adding text to prints when he decided the image alone could not carry the thought, and the words on his pictures are among the few cases in photography where caption becomes poem. A photograph of an empty room gains a paragraph about the person no longer in it, and the gap between the neutral picture and the loaded words is where the feeling detonates. This memoir preserves that voice, letting the handwritten line run through the alphabet as its connective tissue.

The primer format suits a mind that always preferred the aphorism to the essay. Each letter opens onto obsessions, influences, and jokes: a painter he loves, a word he coined, a dead brother, a line of Whitman, a self-portrait undercut by its own caption. The result is a memoir that refuses chronology, arranging a life by association the way memory actually files it, so that a childhood in McKeesport sits a page away from a meditation on Magritte.

The alphabet also grants him permission to be a critic of himself. He can hand one letter to an influence and the next to a doubt, canonize Whitman on one page and puncture his own reputation on another. Few artists this deep into a career will admit in print to the things that scared or embarrassed them; the form coaxes those admissions out by making them feel like entries instead of confessions.

What holds it together is the voice, which is unmistakable, wry, tender, needling, allergic to solemnity even about death, especially about death. A caption will puncture its own image. A grand statement will collapse into a pun. Beneath the play runs a genuinely serious argument about mortality and desire, delivered by someone who learned long ago that the funniest person in the room is often the one taking things most seriously.

The making of the object is generous. It runs heavily illustrated, the reproductions clean, the handwriting preserved so the texts read as objects, not transcriptions, which matters for an artist whose penmanship is part of the picture. It has the density of a scrapbook assembled by someone who kept everything and remembers exactly why.

The conceit has a cost. An A-to-Z invites completism, and a few entries feel included to fill a slot rather than because they burned to be there. Someone meeting this work for the first time may want more of the famous sequences and fewer of the asides, and would do well to keep a fuller retrospective within reach to see the images at full strength. As a primer it is a door, not the whole house.

Read it, then go find Sequences and Now Becoming Then, where the staged narratives run long enough to break your heart. This one sends you there on purpose. That is what a primer is for.