The Spirit Leaves the Body

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.