Let’s begin in the evening, on a sidewalk in Manhattan, outside the Marquis theatre, with a young Meryl Streep. It’s a modest offering, just one simple frame. As background: the city, humming out of focus. Streep, front and centre, is motion held still. Her hair is tousled, blurry in places; her arms reach out past the edges of the frame. And what of the expression on her face? Is it exhilaration? No, that’s not the right word. Satisfaction? Perhaps a pinch. But that’s not quite it either—also lightness, ease. Maybe exuberance is the word. Or is it presence—that indescribable quality of just being there.
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Duane Michals says sixty percent of his work is photography, the rest writing. Does he mean this literally?—the words that appear on the white space around his images? “The beautiful Meryl Streep,” for example, written below the photograph, by the artist’s hand. Or does he mean something else, something more intricate about narrative, about how he crafts an image, about how story lures us in.
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The Australian writer Helen Garner says a story is just a chunk of life with a bend in it. Maybe this is what Michals captures in his portraits—a subject at the bend. Certainly this could describe his portrait of Warren Beatty, perhaps my favourite Duane Michals portrait. Beatty, backlit, sits below a window, handsome, a little serious, maybe even a little sinister. A spectral curtain, blown up by the wind, curves a line around him, the wind at his back. Below, in Michals’ handwriting: Warren Beatty when “Bonnie and Clyde” opened. The tiny imperfection after the “n” in “opened”—a smudge, maybe. Or perhaps a second “n,” written unintentionally, then afterwards crossed out.
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Michals’ photographs draw from cinema, but they are not, themselves, cinematic. (There are, of course, exceptions.) Instead, they use photographic techniques—double exposure, perspective, stillness, sequence, implied movement, eye contact—to evoke narrative properties, like plot, mystery, character, consequence. And they draw from poetry, too, in their use of space, in their concision, in how they resist containment. How, for example, should we read his portraits of Joseph Cornell in his bedroom? In the first, Cornell stands looking in a mirror. He seems to almost vanish in front of the light of a window, as if turning into smoke. In the second, Cornell leans on the end of his bed and looks down at a tiny glass container. Inside: a grasshopper, a cricket, maybe a locust. The photographs feel like a merging of Cornell’s work and Michaels’. They say something about art, about death, about what we leave behind. They suggest a stripping away of story as we near its end.
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Is there anything more seductive than an unfinished sentence—the desire to know what word comes next. Michals’ portraits feel like diary passages that run past the end of the page.
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One of the strangest things about Michals’ portraits is how casual they tend to feel— as if he and his subject were simply playing, hanging out. There is no sense of a stylist, of an entourage, of a team. Just two people and a camera. In this way, they feel out of time, rare. But there is also a sense of person-ness—of Michals’ interest in his subjects as people, not as characters, or icons, or god forbid, brands. And though Michals has a style, each image is distinct. “You should never take the same portrait twice,” he’s said. I think maybe he’s succeeded.
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There is the question, too, of portraiture itself: What do we expect a portrait to do? Reveal someone? That’s always seemed horseshit to me. Yet, Michals feels like he gets close. Closer, maybe, than any other photographer I can think of. Perhaps because he manages to say so much with one image—or in some cases, a few. His portraits also make me interested in his subjects, even if I don’t know at first who they are. When I first saw his photograph of Ludmilla Tscherina, for example, I was awed. What a photograph—her face in a hand mirror, the city out of focus. Who is this woman? I wondered. Why has Michals photographed her this way? What is her story? What came before the bend?
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I think for a moment about the other photograph of young Meryl Streep—the Ted Thai image from 1981: Streep, on a busy New York subway, in a floral dress and large, tortoise shell sunglasses, which rest on the top of her head. Her right hand is wrapped around a subway pole, her left is gripping the strap of her purse. She’s smiling, perhaps a touch uncomfortably, and there is a warmth in her eyes. We recognize the person she will come to be. Streep is brightly lit, thanks to a flash, and the rest of the train is dim, the passengers’ faces serious. The photograph feels like a snapshot—like you or I could have taken it. It has a casualness, an intimacy, and it is compositionally interesting. But would the photograph have the same impact if it wasn’t of Streep? Or does it only work because we know something the woman in the photograph doesn’t—because we know, as viewers, that she is approaching the bend.
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I read somewhere—I can’t remember where—that after their shoot, Michals and Streep had tea and cookies, either at his place or hers. This detail has stayed with me, maybe because it is a good story. But looking at the image, it also makes sense. There is some sense of a relationship between Streep and Michals that feels hard to fake (though if anyone could pull it off…). This feeling transfers to us as well—partly because of how Streep looks into the lens. And perhaps this is one of Michals’ gifts: he makes the viewer a character too. We are drawn into the narrative, like a reader holding a novel, or a listener standing within earshot of a falling tree.
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And so I return to that difficult-to-describe expression on her face, and wonder if maybe where adjectives fail story might succeed. A young actor dances outside the theatre she will one day perform on. Or she imagines ahead to her first live bow. Or maybe it’s something more casual, something as simple as a young Streep, not yet famous, running down the New York sidewalk to meet you. The evening is warm, and Streep, flustered and five minutes late, calls out: “Sorry, sorry! I’m here.” You can hear the sound of footsteps on the pavement; you can feel her joy, palpable, as she nears. She runs toward you, hopping playfully from foot to foot. And then, just as the shutter clicks, she arrives.
Such a beautiful interpretation and description of Michals work! I find his work so unique and inspiring. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about his work!
Nicely done.