50 / 52
“A
CAMERA IS LIKE
a type-
writer, in the sense in
which you can use the
machine to write a love
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
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.
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
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
Slipping Glimpse of the Narrative Eye
J
AMES
P
OLCHIN
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.
James Polchin teaches writing at New York University and is a fre-
quent contributor to this magazine.
ART
Continued on page 49
Duane Michals,
Narcissus
(one in a series), 1986
50
The Gay & Lesbian Review
/
WORLDWIDE