GLR May June

ART

Slipping Glimpse of the Narrative Eye

“A CAMERA IS LIKE a type- writer, in the sense in which you can use the machine to write a love

These elements combine to produce thoughtful and deeply intimate images. To encounter a Michals photograph is to be caught somewhere between a poet’s con- cern for language and detail, a photogra- pher’s eye for the quotidian, and a surrealist’s use of juxtaposition and illu- sion. (He has had a long-standing fascina- tion with Belgian painter René Magritte and did several portraits of the artist and his wife in the 1970s.) He has explored this unique alchemy over the years, ex- hibiting in solo and group shows in the U.S. and abroad and publishing over twenty photo books. But his place in the art world has often been a mixed one: crit- ics have described his work as everything from sentimental to powerfully inventive. Born in 1932, Michals was raised in a

J AMES P OLCHIN

letter, a book, or a business memo,” the photographer Duane Michals said in a 2001 interview with Italian critic Enrica Viganò, which is reproduced in Story- teller: The Photographs of Duane Michals . He added that some photogra- phers use a camera “simply to document reality: a face you pass on the street, a car accident. I think the camera can also be used as a vehicle of the imagination.” Pro- duced as the catalog for a retrospective ex- hibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh earlier this year and currently the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachu- setts, Storyteller presents critical essays, early and recent interviews with the artist, and reproductions of some of his more important series. Michals has used the camera as such a vehicle for over fifty years, producing a still-growing portfolio of work that has often challenged our notions of what photography should look like in both form and subject matter. When he started out tak- ing photographs in the 1960s, he had little interest in the kind

Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh Nov. 1, 2014 to Feb. 16, 2015 Peabody Essex Museum, Essex, Massachusetts March 7 to June 21, 2015 Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals Edited by Linda Benedict-Jones Prestel. 240 pages, $75.

working-class neighborhood outside of Pittsburgh. His father was a steelworker and his mother worked as a live-in domes- tic servant, leaving Michals to be raised by his Slovak immi- grant grandparents, who spoke little English. His upbringing was quite similar to that of his contemporary, Andy Warhol, who also grew up in an immigrant, working-class Slovak fam- ily in Pittsburgh. Both men would ultimately leave home to study art and would eventually land in New York, where they would start their creative careers in commercial art. But Warhol’s aloof and ironic stance in both his public persona and his art—as well as his meteoric rise to celebrity status—con- trasts sharply with Michals’ expressive sincerity, emotional acuity, and oftentimes comic play in his art. “He has never been a photographer’s photographer,” writes Linda Benedict- Jones, the exhibition curator and chief writer for this collec- tion, in her introductory essay. She adds that despite this marginal position among his peers, “he has carved a place for himself in contemporary art history and left an indelible mark on all kinds of people who trade in human communication and visual expression.” As the essays in this collection show, it is Michals’ inti- macy of ideas and emotions that define his work and its ap- peal. Allen Ellenzweig’s essay, “Wounded by Beauty,” begins with an early encounter with Michals’ Paradise Regained , a 1968 series of images that captures a young man and woman staring back at us as they sit in a sparse apartment, dressed in business attire. As the series progresses, the furniture is re- placed by an increasingly dense forest of plants, and the man and woman lose layers of clothing, “gradually reveal[ing] themselves in the glory of their nakedness and sinless inno- cence.” But it is the seductive image of Adam, who sits clos- est to the camera, muscled and angelic, that attracted

Duane Michals, Narcissus (one in a series), 1986

of Cartier-Bresson “decisive moment realism” that was the genre’s dominant æsthetic. Instead, he explored photography’s creative and invented potential using double and long expo- sures, creating narrative sequences made up of images, often adding lyrical captions in his own handwriting—which, he once said, turned the mechanical form of the photograph into a unique and personal work.

James Polchin teaches writing at New York University and is a fre- quent contributor to this magazine.

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