There is, in the body of work that Duane Michals has given to the world, a five-part sequence called The Return of the Prodigal Son that fairly sums up the spirit and the character of this endearing and enduring photographer. A young man, handsome and naked, walks disconsolately into a room where an older man sits at a table
reading a newspaper: Some minimal, sympathetic conversation ensues, and the older man-Michals himself, begins to take off his clothes, which he gives to the prodigal son. The final frame shows the now clothed son and the now naked father leaning towards one another in an embrace that places the young head on the older's shoulders. They are indistinguishable, and their combined gesture suggests an architecture not unlike hands clasping in a prayer of consolation. Certainly, in this work, there is a sense to alter a notion from Boethius, of the consolation of photography. The medium becomes an effective instrument of forgiveness and recognition in what we call the human condition. In Paradise Regained, Michals employs clothing and its removal to create another contemporary parable: this time a sitting man and a standing woman go from being dressed in a room full of objects to being naked in a room overgrown with plants. The final image shows them looing out at the camera like Adam and Eve in a landscape designed by the Douanier Rousseau. It is a divestiture that leads to a provisional innocence: the prototypical man and woman find themselves in a landscape of their own unmaking. Many of Michal's photographic sequences are reconfigurations of stories that have mythological and religious resonance: the fall from paradise, the prodigal son, the bogeyman and the uneasy relationship between youth and age. So in The Old Man Kills the Minotaur the classical story is really a contemporary restaging of a narrative of sexual anxiety and loss of power, realized in the virile minotaur's successful wooing of the young woman. The old man's struggle is for vengeance, and it is only one of the variations Michals works on what he calls
"this great father-son thing that I've been dealing with for a long time." It is a complicated inquiry that involves everything
from passivity to power; his fathers and sons wear many masks whether they have them on or not. When the minotaur is shot the arrow pierces his heart and in the last frame his mask has come off to reveal a young man; the memory of beauty is the real casualty in this sequence and in the work of a photographer who takes such sensual delight watching a man dry himself after a bath. It is a sobering reminder of the damage we are capable of doing to what we desire. There is often a sense of imminent danger in Michals's photography; The Bogeyman, in which a child seems to touch into life a coat that menaces her while she sleeps, is a dressed rehearsal for a sequence like The Flashlight. Here a sleeping woman is partially undressed by a man carrying a flashlight which he shines on the vulnerable parts of her body-mouth, breast and sex. Similarly in The Fallen Angel, the celestial visit starts out as a benediction and ends up as a transgression. The angel's sexual encounter with the woman (another variation on the biblical story of The Annunciation) is taken to be regrettable. The result is the disappearance of the angel's wings and his humiliating departure in plain clothes. Michals likes the fluidity of his narratives; they shift back and forth between the sacred and the profane, between the fully realized and the subtly imagined. He has avoided what he calls the aesthetics. of shock and focussed on a photography of the ineffable. If his art is about imminent danger, it is also about immanent antici- pation. No other photographer has at- tempted to document the phenomenon of the spirit leaving the body, or of a man going to heaven, both of which are titles he has given to specific photographic sequences of his work. This is very risky business and no one is more fully aware of it than Michals himself. But he wel- comes the flirtation with sentimentality—he says in the following interview that he "yearns for vulnerability." The key is expression and in his movement towards honesty and passion he has worked resolutely against any and all restraints. Michals can be too tricky for his own good and the relationship that his work establishes between image and text can sometimes be an unequal one. But he is an artist indispensable to our age; he brings an unparalleled generosity and sense of wonder to the art of photography and has personalized the medium in a way that is unique. He may not be heaven-sent, but he has the smell and the look of the place in his photographs.
The following interview was done over three days in August of this year. During that time Michals had gone to Maine to photograph the writer Stephen King for The New Yorker. The interview was conducted by Robert Enright.
BORDER CROSSINGS: How did the Stephen King shoot go yesterday?
DUANE MICHALS: Beautifully. When I got there all the conditions were very bad but I liked him enormously and we got along very well. It turns out his wife was a photographer and knew my work, so that helped grease the wheels.
Bc: In your introduction to Album: The Portraits of Duane Michals (1988) you write about how you approach portraiture. Is it as much free falling as you imply? DM: It depends on what I'm doing. I don't like to work in studios, but I love going to locations and having to figure some- thing out. When I get there I don't know what I'm going to find. So it's very hard to be specific. But Stephen King lent himself to certain ideas.
BC: Because of the nature of his work?
DM: Yeah. So that was already a direction to go in. It's usually more like playing that's the great serendipity. I love the challenge of having to figure it out on the spot. Photographers like Annie Leibovitz—who I think is wonderful for what she does-travel with a big entourage. Her camera language is quite different than mine. I think she works within a very controlled situation. I like to deal with what I can't control. I thrive on the uncertainty principle.
BC: Do you still mostly shoot in natural light?
DM: Ninety per cent of the time.
BC: Are your portraits collaborations? I look at your photographs of Joseph Cornell and Claes Oldenburg and it seems you're able to get them to do things or appear in ways that certainly aren't conventional. They have to be cooperating.
DM: Cornell, of course, dictated the terms of his surrender. We had an interesting language; I would say, "That looks promising," and he'd say, "Do you really think so?" Which meant don't take it. Then I'd say, "Oh, look how the light's hitting that," and he'd say, "Oh that is nice, that would be a nice picture." So we had developed a relationship where I didn't intrude. I always work within the vocabulary of the person I'm taking the picture of, if they have one. So with Oldenburg you think great blowups.
BC: Have you ever been intimidated by anyone whose portrait you were taking? Given how much you admired Magritte's painting 1 assume a lot of weight would have attended meeting him.
DM: Absolutely. And also with DeChirico. He was even more weighty. My pictures are lousy because I was so intimidated by him, I could hardly get him to do anything.But I've been very privileged that the camera has given me access to people I never would have met otherwise. I'm just flattered that they'd let me take their picture in the first place.
BC: Is that humility genuine?
DM: Totally. How could I possibly come to Magritte's door-the guy's one of the fucking geniuses of the century-and say, "Now sit over there." I'm not one of those fashion magazine stars. For me portraiture is about sharing a moment with some- body. Most portraits are entirely about vanity. I wrote an essay, "I'm Much Nicer Than My Face," which sums it all up. I knew my mother and my father my entire lifetime and not once did they ever reveal themselves to me. So the more braggadocio you get in terms of what the photographer's "capturing," which is a word that should be completely abolished from any photographer's language, the more offensive it is. This is a cardinal principle with me.
BC: Does that mean it's impossible to ever get what you call "clues to our own truth" in portraiture?
DM: I have a very difficult time with that and I'll tell you why. You must assume people are, by and large, not what they appear to be. And when they get in front of a camera they're even less so. You see, celebrities are the easiest people to take pictures of because they bring their history with them. There's no such thing as a bad picture of a celebrity. The worse the picture, probably the more sellable it is. If you could get Barbra Streisand sitting on a crapper, you'd make a fortune. All professional celebrities are like that. Their only talent is being famous.
BC: On the subject of fame, the portraits you did of Warhol and his mother, in 1958, are fascinating.
DM: I love those portraits because that was Andy unadorned. Before he became "professional Andy," when he was still my sweet little gay boy doing shoes. To me Andy is a great graphic designer who happened to have a great sense of PR and self.He was the artist predator. But he really had another personality beyond. His persona was much larger than his work.