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Ellenzweig’s eye, prompting him to
wonder in that first encounter: “Who
was this photographer who placed be-
fore my eyes a figure so luscious and
seductive? How did he, this Duane
Michals, know my secret?” It is this
kind of provocative intimacy, this secret
of visual expression, that has made
Michals’ work so compelling within
late 20th-century gay imagery.
In such important works as
Homage
To Cavafy
(1978),
The Nature of Desire
(1986),
Narcissus
(1986), and
Salute,
Walt Whitman
(1996), Michals merged
the personal with the historical and the
mythical through a visual language of
desire that appears always just out of
reach. Unlike the younger generation of
gay-identified photographers working
in the late 1970s and ’80s for whom ho-
moerotic desire was their explicit sub-
ject (notably Robert Mapplethorpe),
Michals offered, in Ellenzweig’s words,
“indirection, ambiguity, metaphor” as
ways to engage with “same-sex amity,
physical adoration, and romantic long-
ing in images that are staged to myste-
rious, poetic effect.” In some sense it is
the
idea
of desire, with its visual and
poetic uncertainties, rather than its ac-
tuality that motivates Michals in such
works.
What is clear throughout the essays
and interviews is how Michals saw his
place in 20th-century photography,
which was precisely through his resist-
ance to its demands. When
The New
York Times
featured Michals in an in-
terview just before the exhibition at the
Carnegie Museum opened, they titled
the piece “Documents of a Contrarian.”
This title underscored not only the
artist’s direct and sometimes flat criti-
cisms of art world pretensions (most
acutely demonstrated in his visual
satire of artists such as Cindy Sherman
and Andreas Gursky in his 2006
Foto
Follies: How Photography Lost Its
Virginity on the Way to the Bank
), but
also suggested the ways in which he
taught himself (and others) the freedom
to push at the boundaries of photo-
graphic art.
Max Kozloff, in his essay on
Michals’ most recent work of painting
brightly-colored modernist and surre-
alist designs on 19th-century tintypes,
Michals
Continued from page 50
thinks they evoke a collage-like dis-
continuity between past and present in
which the earlier image becomes a dis-
embodied portrait, reconfigured in the
present under Michals’ brushstrokes.
As Kozloff writes, photography for
Michals is “a ghostly medium, since it
transcribes appearances but lacks sub-
stance, forever disallowing our touch.”
We experience this in so many of his
images that play with shadows and
ghostly figures, images haunted by a
presence seen and unseen.
In a series from the 1970s titled
Chance Meeting
, we watch the alleyway
encounter of two men in business suits,
their bodies passing in silence. In the
first few images, we encounter the scene
from just behind one man’s shoulder,
looking down the alley as the other ap-
proaches in the distance. The photo-
graphs move like a series of film stills
as the two men encounter each other, ex-
change glances, and turn backwards to
look as the space between them grows.
The final image presents just the one
man, staring back at us down the length
of the alley. Throughout the sequence
only their glances suggest the potential
sexual encounter that never materializes
as the two men float away like fleeting
apparitions.
What this collection does best is to il-
luminate how Michals’ creative, genre-
crossing work has influenced the history
of late 20th-century photography. Aaron
Schuman’s personal and engaging essay,
“Lessons Learned: Three Encounters
with Duane Michals,” sees in the early
work of the 1960s and early ’70s a pre-
scient vision of choreographed and nar-
rative photography that later became
vital to the genre’s place in contempo-
rary art. Shuman correctly notes that
Michals has spent the last half-century
blurring the boundaries between “pho-
tography and art, between fiction and
reality, between the personal and the
universal, and between artwork and the
artists.” But more importantly, he has
“consistently redefined such bound-
aries in terms of his own life and his
own needs, and has even pushed past
such boundaries, repeatedly and res-
olutely exploring territories well be-
yond the established frontiers of
photography itself.”
Duane Michals,
Chance Meeting
, 1973
May–June 2015
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