GLR May June

Michals

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.”

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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,

Duane Michals, Chance Meeting , 1973

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