Many of the themes that Michals photographs and writes about are issues that require a substantial level of soul searching, both on the part of the photographer and the viewer. And very often, they present questions that are as difficult to ask as they are to try and answer: questions that can make people uncomfortable to confront. "Sometimes it's very painful and these are issues that one eventually faces if you have any kind of a mind." It is this very uncomfortableness, these tender spots in the human psyche, that he works so hard to expose. "What it is about is intimacy," says Michals. "It's about a kind of intimacy and privacy and whispers. What I want is that part of you that you're embarrassed about. That part of you that you don't want to tell anybody out loud."

12. I Remember the Argument 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 The sequence of images entitled "I Remember the Argument," is one such difficult issue that Michals himself has had to confront. The six photo series that reveals a person (whom the artist describes as a kind of "Greek chorus") standing in an empty room remembering a domestic argument that turned suddenly violent. "My mother and father had a very disruptive marriage and I was used to seeing arguments and I was used to having periods where people didn't talk to each other and I remember those arguments," he says. "I felt that if I went back to the kitchen in the house where I was brought up and if I stood there long enough, all that kind of drama that occurred there would come back to me. It's still there in those walls, it's still there."