DUANE MICHALS
Afterimage-interview by Nina Strand:
It was inspiring to learn, when interviewing Michals in 2016, that he, at the age of 83, had made his first films. These were created for his exhibition Sequences & Talking Pictures at DC Moore Gallery in New York, which featured a number of his short films, or ‘mini-movies’ as Michals called them. The show also included posters for the films and several of his earlier picture sequences from the 1960s and 1970s.
‘A new illiteracy of images is being born,’ he said, ‘and this is the result of the illiteracy of a culture with pretend language and pretend emotions. The images people are being presented with don’t demand much.´ Donald Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of one-line-insult intellectual discourse. Trump is the ultimate destination of the trivialisation of language and meaning.
He said he didn’t pay much attention to photography as a field, feeling peripheral to PHOTOGRAPHY. However, because he loves the medium, he remains thoughtful and critical about its possibilities and limitations. He has always enjoyed literature and poetry, in some ways more than photography, because writing conjures up an imaginary universe that you share with the writer and help create. Photography is defined by the facts it represents. ‘It doesn’t float in the air the way poetry does.’ De Chirico and Magritte are both poetic painters who play with facts, yet contradict them with mystery, in his opinion.
Years ago, he saw a photograph of a young man on crutches. His leg was in a cast, he had no shirt on, and he was standing at home, leaning in a doorway. Michals was deeply moved by his vulnerability, his future possibilities as a man, and his fragility. Although he has never specifically copied this image, it has crept into his work as part of how he perceives life.
Perhaps some of this can be seen in his work The Unfortunate Man, which is currently included in the exhibition Fragile beauté. Photographies de la collection de Sir Elton John et David Furnish, at Jeu de Paume, along with other works by Michals.
Interview with Duane Michals published in the essaybook Perpetual Photographs, 2020.