The Spirit Leaves the Body
On loan to The Met
This work of art is currently on loan to the museum.In the late 1960s Michals began creating narrative sequences of staged photographs that imaginatively tackle metaphysical themes such as memory, desire, and mortality. “I believe in the imagination,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1976 book, Real Dreams. “What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.” In The Spirit Leaves the Body, Michals summons a ghostly apparition by means of double exposure, reviving the ethereal iconography of nineteenth-century spirit photography in a new poetic context.
Artwork Details
- Title: The Spirit Leaves the Body
- Artist: Duane Michals (American, born McKeesport, Pennsylvania, 1932)
- Date: 1968
- Medium: Gelatin silver prints (7)
- Dimensions: Image: 8.9 x 12.7 cm (3 1/2 x 5 in.)
Sheet: 12.7 x 17.8 cm (5 x 7 in.)
Frame: 17 x 22.4 cm (6 11/16 x 8 13/16 in.), each - Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York
- Curatorial Department: Photographs