Duane Michals, the pioneering photographer, died last week at the age of 94.
He was self-taught, creating work according to standards entirely his own.
“Because I didn’t learn the photo rules it was very easy for me to abandon them. You’re either defined by the medium…well, I redefined the medium.”
Famous for his narrative sequences (including the famous “Chance Meeting” from 1970), these scenes were structured like a comic strip and were a genuine innovation for the era.
Duane is also famous for writing on his photos.
He told me, “What I write about is what you cannot see. I augment the photograph where the photograph fails…and photographs fail all the time. So, I write to expand my ability to communicate something.”
This portrait of a seemingly happy couple from 1967, one of my favorites of his, reads, “This photograph is my proof. This photograph is my proof. There was that afternoon, when things were still good between us, and she embraced me, and we were so happy. It did happen, she did love me. Look see for yourself!”
I was fortunate enough to interview Duane at his home in NYC a couple of years before he died. He’s the only person who’s ever threatened to slap me in the middle of the interview.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
DM: If I start to snore, wake me up.
JM: I sure will.
DM: Okay.
JM: So you started taking pictures in your 20s. You were 26, I believe?
DM: I was 28 when I first went to Russia.
JM: Right, and that’s where you started taking pictures. But cameras back then were not as ubiquitous as they are today. Where did you get a camera and what made you want to pick it up?
DM: Well, I always liked the idea of having adventures. And when I lived in McKeesport and I was a boy, I used to love to read stories about pirates and South Seas. I always identified with the cabin boy, not knowing why. So I had a lot of adventures. When I was 14, I went to Texas, to work on the wheat crop, which was a total disaster, but an adventure. And then being a second lieutenant in tanks during the Korean War was a big adventure. And I was destined to come to New York, but McKeesport was not an option. Even Pittsburgh wasn’t an option. I had an aesthetic itch I didn’t know where to scratch, and so that’s how I came to New York.
And I went to Parsons for a year, I dropped out, and when I decided to go to Russia, make it a trip. So I borrowed my friend Tom Lacy’s Argus C3, no light meter. You take pictures when you take a trip; I had no photo ambitions.
JM: Was it like an immediate? Did you feel, “Oh, this is it?” Did you immediately love it?
DM: No, no, no, no, no, no. But I did discover I was very good at it. I learned how to say in Russian, “Можно вас сфотографировать?” which I think means, “May I take your picture?” And I stopped these, something I would never do in New York, I would stop these Russians. And the quality of the pictures, they were consistently high. I had an aesthetic taste. Some people are naturals, like Mickey Mantle throwing a ball when he’s ten years old in his home, and, well, I’m a natural in photography. My instincts are perfect.
JM: You’re natural and you’re good at it, but do you enjoy it?
DM: Yeah, well, of course it was, oh, do I. I love it, I love it.
JM: Oh, okay. I thought you were saying you did not like it.
DM: Oh, no, no, I was just, then I was just taking pictures without pretensions, without any idea that I would become a serious photographer, I was just taking, and the pictures were consistently good. From the very beginning, the pictures I did in Russia on that trip were high quality, there’s no question.
JM: And so you were living in New York City at that—
DM: Yeah, all this time, I was living on Bleecker Street.
JM: I think that I wrongly assume that you moved to New York City to be gay, but you moved for a career.
DM: Yeah, yeah, I wasn’t, I didn’t, in McKeesport, when I was in high school, we didn’t have gay people, but we had sissies, and you did not want to be a sissy, like Stuart Middleman was a sissy. I always considered myself a sexual flop.
JM: Wait, what does that mean?
DM: Well, that means, a flop. My show closed out of town. I mean, in New York, people were all doing these wild things, and party, party, and working out, and there I was, looking with my nose pressed up against the window. “What’s that? What’s going on there?” In my entire life, I’ve always been an anomaly. I’m not your average photographer. Fred [Goree] and I were together for 57 years, and we never went to Fire Island. We had a house upstate near Bennington. We had a big farm, we gardened. We never went to the Hamptons. We never went to bars. We wanted to watch our garden grow. Of course I’m gay. I love being gay. We weren’t, I’m not of the Mapplethorpe school of goof giddy, pictures of guys with whips up their ass and leather and—
JM: Overt.
DM: Oh yeah, he made a whole career out of being professionally gay. And he was the one who, they closed the museum show of his in Cincinnati and he became a cause célèbre. We just never particularly traveled in gay company. We didn’t go to bars, as I said. We didn’t go to dances. We lived our own life.
JM: And you’re happy doing that.
DM: Yes.
JM: I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but you were not like a typical gay man? Is that okay to say?
DM: Yeah. What do you mean by typical?
JM: I don’t think that anything is typical, but I’m thinking you were saying like, you’re not the Fire Island types, you’re not going to the bars or Studio 54.
DM: Yeah, yeah.
JM: But I do think that looking at your work, looking at your photographs, you’ve never shied away from queerness or sexuality and desire.
DM: No, I never have and I’ve always been upfront about it. No, it doesn’t necessarily follow because we’re not typical gay guys that we’re not gay. I mean, it’s—
JM: I hope you don’t think I’m implying that.
DM: Not at all, not at all. But I was just never professionally gay, although I, oh my God, I did a book called, The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy. Do you know the Greek poet?
JM: No.
DM: I’m going to smack you. You must know Cavafy. I bet you know Tom of Finland.
JM: Yes.
Fuck you. You don’t know Cavafy.
JM: Maybe I do and I just don’t know the—
DM: You don’t. Or Walt Whitman.
JM: Yes.
DM: Walt Whitman was huge. I got very much involved in Walt Whitman. I did two books on Cavafy and one book on Walt Whitman. So as a gay person, I’ve always been upfront about it, but I’ve never been, I’ve never been professionally gay.
JM: But you were putting gay sexuality in your work before queerness was accepted.
DM: Always there, yeah.
JM: So was there ever any pushback for it?
DM: No, I was always amazed. I didn’t get any reaction. I didn’t get labeled or anything right away. Because I did lots and lots of different things, and being gay was just part of what I did.
JM: The famous picture, Chance meeting from 1970. The queerness was so obvious and present, and yet I’m just not used to seeing that in art from that—
DM: But also, that particular version, it wasn’t about two hustlers walking by or two, I mean like two guys are—
JM: Oh, well-dressed men.
DM: And if you’re gay, that wasn’t on the table. But in those days, you knew that that was one of the interpretations, it’s a cruise. But it’s also about two people recognizing each other, but it’s too late. The moment had passed.
JM: And you’re not only interested in male sexuality.
DM: It could have been two women.
JM: Women are all in your work too.
DM: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’m an equal opportunity expressionist. I’ve talked to somebody about doing another book, and they said, what do you want to do? And I thought, well, I’d like to do a book called The Expressionist, because it’s not about photography…I write, I photograph, I paint, I do all kinds, that’s my sculpture. Yeah, I do all kinds of things, so I don’t label myself, but, so it’s how well do you express yourself. And, oh, here’s the important thing, ingredient I have. I have a huge curiosity. Everything is about curiosity. It’s my curiosity that makes me want to see what things look like or how a sentence sounds in my ear.
JM: Well, so I think that one of the questions I had was that you’re always described as an innovator and a pioneer with a new genre, but correct me if I’m wrong, my understanding of your photography is that you are simply making art that you liked.
DM: Oh, shut up. No art.
JM: No?
DM: No, I—
JM: What should I call it?
DM: I hate the—
JM: Oh, I’m sorry. What should I say? Photos?
DM: Said art? No, no. I’m doing my work.
JM: Work. So—
DM: My work.
JM: My understanding is that you were just shooting what you wanted to shoot and not reinvent anything.
DM: No, no. I had to reinvent, first of all, I began to tell little stories. First of all, I did double exposures by accident. This camera was so cheap. Rather than say, “Oh, look, I screwed up, it’s a double,” I thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” And then I began to learn everything on the job. So first I did double exposures. And then I began to tell little stories. The moment before, the decisive moment, the moment after. And then after I did that, I began to write with photographs. I did a picture called Letter from My Father. It’s my mother, my father, and my brother. And if you look at the pictures, it shows you exactly what my dad looked like when he was in his fifties, and my brother was twenty or whatever. But I wrote about it because it didn’t tell you, it described what they looked like, told you nothing about my relationship with my father. So then I began to write with photographs, and everybody knew a photograph was worth a thousand words. No, not at all. And so I began to write because it’s the only way I could express myself was to…because I didn’t learn the photo rules, it was very easy for me to abandon them. You are, as I said, you’re either defined by the medium, or…I redefined the medium.
JM: And that was conscious too, for you.
DM: Absolutely, absolutely. I consciously wrote about my mother, my father, and my brother, because you could never see that. And that’s what gets me so angry about following the rules of people believing that you photograph running across the street, and one’s giving the other one a finger, and they go, “Wow,” or, beautiful people, for example. Look at a Bruce Weber picture of some beautiful college boy leaning against the wall, and people say, like, “Wow, what a beautiful picture.” No, no, no, no. It’s a very ordinary picture of a beautiful guy. It’s the guy that, if that was an ugly guy leaning against the wall, you wouldn’t say that’s a beautiful picture. You would say something nasty. But the thing is, the photograph itself is very ordinary. It’s a very straight, unimaginative, the identification of beauty is the least of the problem. I mean, it’s a given. I’ve done over 40 books and I did a book called Questions Without Answers. And in there, I ask what is beauty, I ask all these questions, and I try to get into what is death, what is beauty, what is old age, what is youth, so it’s curiosity.
JM: I think it’s clear looking at your work, you’re not interested in beauty only, right? Or at all. So when you’re trying to shoot a portrait, what are you trying to do or capture?
DM: Portraits are another thing. I had a very successful commercial career.
JM: But I was wondering if your commercial career was a challenge because when you’re shooting for Vogue and Esquire, you don’t have the end say.
DM: No, no, you, well, I did, if I was doing a portrait, but I did commercial work. I did Benson and Hedges, I did Vogue Paris collection, Mirabella’s Paris collection. Let’s see, I did a big story on Eskimos for Esquire, I worked on the Olympics for the Mexican government. The Mexican government hired me to photograph around and about Mexico for the Olympics.
JM: And you felt like you were able to shoot the photos you wanted to shoot.
DM: Always. But if I was doing an assignment, and I did big campaigns, Scientific American for five years, Massachusetts Mutual, the insurance company, for eleven years, ten years, something, I mean. And my favorite story is when I started out not knowing anything, and I was working, doing a job, and a young woman came up to me, she said, “Are you Duane?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “Well, what are you doing here?” I said, “Well, I’m making a living.” She said to me, “Oh, I would never sell out.” And I wanted to say, “Honey, you have nothing to sell. It’s much harder to be a commercial photographer. “Are you kidding? All these arty-farty photographers wouldn’t last for five seconds in the commercial market.
JM: Why is that?
DM: Because they’re not equipped to. They’re very good at photographing their girlfriend’s ass. Or a hundred pictures of flowers or what the fuck. But to have to go someplace and to photograph the president of IBM. I used to work for a magazine called Show. Show was in the 60s and it was a precursor to Vanity Fair. Smart art, big deal. And they sent me, I’d been taking pictures for six months. I hardly knew what I was doing. And they sent me out to Hollywood, to work on a movie called It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. We had all the big stars in it. I’m flying first class. “Hello, yes, I have more champagne.” And I think, what am I doing? I’ve only been taking for six months photographs. Do they know that I don’t know what I’m doing? Then I thought, well, they could have sent, they could have sent Bresson, they could have sent Robert Frank. Here’s what I said to myself, “Self. They could have sent anyone, but they sent you, what you do is the solution.” And then I began to value, and that was very liberating.
JM: And so, when you’re shooting people, you’re not trying to capture beauty. What are you—
DM: Don’t use the word. I tried to identify something of what’s happening at the moment. I did a lot of celebrities, and here’s what happened. I had a scene where Vogue would say, Kim Novak is at the plaza. She’s free between three and four. Can you take her? Yeah. I’d get there at three. Before me, Time magazine had just left, and after me it was going to be The New York Times. So I go, I would go to a hotel room with Kim Novak, and so what do I, I have the light, then what do I do? I didn’t have a formula. I wasn’t like Avedon, where you do headshots. Those aren’t headshots. They’re big passport pictures. You only become the artist…I hate that word, artist, when you bring insight into what you’re photographing. When I photographed Meryl Streep, she was not known. We went up to Times Square. We just ran around, and her energy and hers, it’s there, this young…I’m trying to share their energy with the person who looks at the photograph.
JM: And so the photos you take, though, not commercial…
DM: For myself. Well, most, a lot of them were set up. The two guys on the street, they were set up. That was set up.
JM: Right, because you stage your photos. You’re not this documentary photographer going out.
DM: I had done documentary photography, but I stage everything.
JM: And I think what draws me to your work is that they’re not literal. For example, during the AIDS crisis, you were not out there shooting men living with AIDS. You were creating photos, an interpretation.
DM: Well, I was doing my expression of what I thought. So what I did was simply a guy with his head down and he looks like he’s dead. He’s asleep. And I began to cover his face in flowers until he’s completely covered in flowers. And there were four pictures that said, AIDS, under each photograph. So I wasn’t going to show you grotesque. I wanted to show you sympathy. I wanted to show you sadness.
JM: And going back to what you said earlier about you and your partner Fred not being a part of the Hell’s Kitchen gay world, AIDS was unavoidable though.
DM: Well, yeah, but we only knew three friends who had AIDS. I have friends who knew 20 people that had AIDS.
JM: Three’s almost unbelievable.
DM: And two of them were lovers.
JM: Wow.
DM: I mean, it’s just a fact.
JM: What about, you were in New York City during, when the Stonewall uprising happened, did that make an impact on you at all?
DM: Yeah. Well, we lived down the street, we lived on 9th Street between 5th and 6th, and this was around the corner. Yeah, I would, yeah, I thought it was terrific. I was very much for gay people. Did you ever see a picture I did called The Unfortunate Man? It’s a picture of a guy, a naked man, his back is toward the camera, he’s leaning against the wall like this, and he’s got boots, men’s boots on his head. And then the text said, “The unfortunate man could not touch the one he loved. It had been declared illegal by the law. Slowly, his hands became toes, and he began to wear shoes, boots on his hands to disguise his shame. It never occurred to him to break the law.” Think about it, gay guys pretending that they’re straight or getting married and all that kind, they have to break the law.
I would never show guys with signs, but I would show you the nature. My Cavafy book was called Homage to Cavafy. There’s a picture in there of an older man reading the palm of a young man, and it’s in a room filled with debris, and that’s the picture. But the text said, “He could see quite clearly in his hand that there would be a terrible tragedy, but I couldn’t tell him that. And so I lied.” See, you’ve got to separate the nature of something from what it looks like.
JM: And the text, writing on photos helps with that.
DM: Oh, absolutely. I’m an expressionist. Text has always been with a photograph. You’ll see a picture of Trump hopefully falling down the flight of steps, and underneath it’ll say, Trump falls down the flight of steps and breaks his neck on January 3rd in Washington. The text, the writing tells you what you see. What I write about is what you cannot see. I augment the photograph, where the photograph fails, they photograph fail all the time. So I write to tell you to expand my ability to communicate something.
JM: How often are you workshopping the text? Did you ever write something and say, that’s not correct?
DM: I’ll show you, I have pages, I’ve got tons of, here, hold on. Yeah. I don’t know how many of these I have, they’re everywhere. This is one I just finished.
JM: Oh my god. Just pages and pages of writing. So are you, you’re figuring out what the text should be and how it should look, it looks like.
DM: No, I think…I mean, I’ve got at least 20 of these. I write more than I take pictures. Yeah, I work things out. I love language. I did, make movies too. Have you seen any movies?
JM: Yeah.
DM: Oh.
JM: You moving into movies makes total sense, since you’ve been directing scenes in your photos for years.
DM: Oh, that’s, I’ve always seen, it’s the next logical step. I’ve done about 40 movies.
JM: What made you move into film?
DM: Because I realized you could make films. To me the key word is expression. Now when I think, here I am who knew nothing about photography, and I did all these things with the camera, and now all people in my generation, they’re either dead or they’re taking the same fucking picture. And what I’ve done in making the films, it completely liberated me. With the computer, we could do all kinds of things. So it completely liberated me.
JM: Are you doing films more than photography now?
DM: Oh, absolutely. Totally. Yeah. And I love it. And I think that’s why I am so long lived, live, is because I have a lot of energy and my energies is, I never needed anybody to give me assignment. It’s always been my curiosity.
JM: With your work, you’ve, I mean, it sounds dumb to say, but you’ve always been asking big questions. You had that book, Questions Without Answers. What are the big questions you’re tackling?
DM: What is life? It’s the same questions. Because they never have any answers. What is life? What is death? What is the universe? What is happiness?
JM: Have those questions changed as you’ve entered your 90s?
DM: No, not at all. Yeah. Because, in fact, I’ve always been aware of death. Always. My second book was The Journey of the Spirit After Death. I’ve done, Death Comes to the Old Lady, Spirit Leaves the Body, I’ve done so many variations on it, but it’s very much tied into my meditating, too. I meditated for eight years. And then, I recently did mushrooms, but I had a terrible trip, terrible, and I think it’s because it was a big downer. I was lonesome. I was depressed. I was melancholy. And somebody said it’s probably because I tapped into my grief for Fred. Fred was sick for seven years. He had Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. I would never send Fred to a place. I don’t care what it cost. And so I think I tapped into my grief.
JM: Before that experience, would you have said that you were still grieving for him?
DM: Oh yeah, the grief never goes away. I have to be very careful so I don’t indulge myself. There are certain things that set it off, certain things.
JM: He died in 2017. Can I ask, what has been most surprising about grief for you?
DM: Oh, the depth of it. To the depth that you were involved with somebody, that’s to the same depth that, if it had just been, no, we spent 57 years together, and we evolved in our relationship too, which is really great. And of course, to that depth, if I permit myself, I get carried away.
JM: Let me know if it’s too much, but I just was wondering, 57 years of somebody, is that luck or do you have a trick?
DM: No, no, you have to work at it. You don’t work at luck. But it was, I’m very lucky, I’m extremely, as a matter of fact, I’m a little bit. Do you believe in luck?
JM: Some days, yeah. Some days, no.
DM: Do I think we make our own luck? Luck to me is seizing the moment. I always say I shoot first and ask questions later. People are afraid to fail. That’s why they don’t risk anything. You will grow more from your failures than you will grow from your success. You will get trapped into a success. If you’re smart, you’ll learn from your failure.
JM: And you feel like you never got trapped in your success, really?
DM: It’s very interesting though, I begin to see my history. By my stand, I’ve been very successful. I’ve been successful as a commercial photographer. I’ve done, like four Life covers. I did a secret agency album for police and all that stuff, and Carly Simon and, but I never noticed it, now that I’m ancient. I’m noticing it.
JM: That must feel good.
DM: It’s nice, it’s nice, it’s comforting. I could have been, I could have failed just as well. But I did it on my own terms. I never kissed any ass that I’d like to have, but I never had to kiss any asses.
JM: And so the commercial photos, they paid for everything else, right?
DM: You’d be shocked how much commercial work I did. And I’m proud of it, I really am. There are those photographers who made a big success doing commercial work. They never had a museum show. And then other photographers who had museum shows couldn’t do commercial work. Well, I’ve done both sides of the street.
JM: With tackling death in your own work and just being curious about it, I mean, that was more abstract death as a concept. Has your feelings about it changed as it becomes more literal in your life?
DM: Well, yes and no. I mean, they’ve gotten deeper. I began to realize I’m overwhelmed by it. The universe is nonsense to us. The best defense. Common sense is nonsense. I’m completely nonsensical. I say the strangest thing to perfect strangers on the street. I think if it’s funny, I’ll say it out loud.
JM: I know it’s a question you probably hate, but do you think about your legacy?
DM: No, I never think about things like that. I couldn’t care less. I feel very good. I’ve done it on my terms. And I’m still doing it. And I haven’t quit. And I’m still capable of being surprised. I’m still capable of evolving. And I’m mostly excited to do something I’ve never done before. That’s the, how do I solve it? What do I do with that.
JM: Do you feel like you are running out of time to do these new things?
DM: No. As a matter of fact, the reason I’m so long lived is because I’m constantly working. I’m constantly doing something. I’m constantly figuring something out.
JM: I believe that.
DM: And I never rest on my laurels on everything. There’s a wonderful book called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. I highly recommend it. And the principle in the book is that when you’re a beginner, you bring great attention to what you’re doing. If you’re doing a recipe, you’re cooking a, it says, you’re baking a cake, it says, two cups of flour, and you go very quick, one, one, a little, and then, dash of brown sugar. But you measure everything very carefully, and you’re very, but then when you bake it a while, you get a little bit piggy or like Julia Child. Oh, a little bit of. And so the idea is you must always be the beginner because a beginner brings great attention to what he does. And after you do a while, you come, you become a habit and you lose, you lose your attention. So I always, because I do things for the first time, I always bring great attention to what I’m doing.
JM: Thank you for the conversation.
DM: Well, my pleasure. I’m sorry. I mostly spend my time alone. I didn’t frighten you, did I?
JM: No, you didn’t. No need to apologize.
DM: Okay. Well, good.
Click here to listen to the full interview on the LGBTQ&A podcast.
LGBTQ&A features interviews with the most interesting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the world. Hosted and produced by Jeffrey Masters. @jeffmasters1
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