Duane Michals Dies at 94 as Crimea Museum Is Set Ablaze in Drone Strike
A war museum in Russian-annexed Crimea was set on fire yesterday during a Ukrainian drone strike, while the art world also marked the death of Duane Michals, the self-taught photographer whose work helped redefine what photography could say.
The Defense of Sevastopol museum in Sevastopol was among the sites hit as Ukrainian drones targeted supply chains to Russian-controlled areas. The blaze at the museum adds another layer of cultural damage to a conflict that has repeatedly placed heritage sites in the path of military escalation.
Michals died at 94 in Manhattan, his dealer Bridget Moore of DC Moore Gallery confirmed. Over a career that lasted into his 90s, he became known for photographic sequences that unfolded like visual stories, often paired with his own handwritten captions. The approach gave his work a distinctly literary, introspective quality and set it apart from more conventional documentary or studio photography.
His influences ranged widely, from William Black and Lewis Carroll to Joseph Cornell and René Magritte, and his images often returned to autobiography, memory, and the uneasy space between what is seen and what is felt. In a 2019 interview, Michals said, “When I write, it’s to talk about what you cannot see in the photograph. It’s to augment the photograph, to give voice to the silence of it.” He also said, “I want to know what something feels like, not what it looks like.”
Michals published more than 25 books and exhibited throughout much of his career. His retrospectives included presentations at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan. In recent years, he also collaborated on short films with Josiah Cuneo.
Elsewhere in the art world, Brussels gallery dépendance, founded in 2003, is closing. Frieze London and Frieze Masters have named nearly 300 exhibitors for their fall fairs, while the Scottish government has pledged £56 million to the National Galleries of Scotland for The Art Works, a major storage and display project in north Edinburgh.
Taken together, the day’s news reflects a field moving between loss, institutional change, and the fragile status of cultural spaces in times of conflict.
