The Return of the Prodigal Son,

1982

For the last five decades, Michals has utilized innovative stylistic approaches to photography, most notably the serial format for which he is best known, in order to tell stories that range from the amusing to the tragic. Influenced by photojournalism and by cinema’s frame-by-frame format, Michals often executes sequences of prints to illustrate the progression of stories via series of staged tableaux. Here, he used this narrative format to reimagine the return and clothing of the prodigal son in a New York City apartment of the 1980s. Subverting the traditional concept of the father as an all-wise figure of authority, immune to the vicissitudes of the human experience, Michals shows the father (portrayed by the artist himself) choosing to give up his own clothes to cover his naked son. Baring himself to cover his son’s shame, the father becomes an empathetic figure, rather than a sympathetic one, experiencing the same vulnerability as his son.