Michals’s work makes innovative use of photo-sequences, often incorporating text to depict emotion and universal themes like love, death, and immortality. His interest in art began at the age of fourteen, while he was attending watercolor university classes at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. From the University of Denver he received a BA in 1953, and after serving two years in the Army, he went to study at the Parsons School of Design in 1956. His plan was to become a graphic designer, but he never completed his studies. For his photographic skills, he says that are self-taught. His interest in photography he discovered while on a holiday in the USSR in 1958. The photographs he made on this trip became his first exhibition held in 1963 at the Underground Gallery in New York City.