JTF (just the facts): A total of 64 photographic works, generally framed in black and unmatted, and hung in the two rooms of the main gallery space. 50 of the works are made up of single or multiple gelatin silver prints with hand applied text, taken between 1962 and 2015 (some vintage, some printed in 2015). 2 of the works are made up of c-prints with hand applied text, taken in 2001 and 2010 and printed in 2015. The remaining 12 works are oil on vintage photographs (tintype, albumen print, celluloid photo button etc.), made between 2012 and 2015 and displayed on unrolled newsprint paper. Physical sizes for the individual prints/works range from roughly 3×5 to 14×19 (or reverse), with edition sizes of 5 and 25 where appropriate. (Installation shots below.)
Comments/Context: With three exhibitions in three years, DC Moore Gallery is putting some concerted effort into reexamining the career of Duane Michals. While Michals is perhaps best known for his images in sequences and series, often exploring how photographs can document fleeting connections, encounters, dreams, and memories, the recent shows have sought to expand that narrow characterization of his talents and accomplishments. In 2013, the gallery showed a selection of Michals’ boldly overpainted photographs (a few are reprised here), and in 2014, it unearthed his early pictures from 1960s New York (reviewed here). This new exhibit makes the case for Michals as an accomplished and innovative portrait maker, gathering together five decades of his photographs of artists, celebrities, actors, writers, and other famous faces.
What comes through most in Michals’ single frame portraits is that he was a consistently restless compositional experimenter. He used multiple exposures to capture different facets of E.L. Doctorow, Barbara Streisand, Rene Magritte, Philip Roth, and JC de Castelbajac, and employed reflections, mirrors, and transparent glass refractions in his complex characterizations of Johnny Cash, Eartha Kitt, Ray Johnson, Francis Ford Coppola, and Annie Leibovitz (through her eyeglasses). Among the other unexpected techniques he tried out are a bird’s eye view (the Mamas and the Papas), a feet first pose (Jeremy Irons), a portrait through blinds (Maya Angelou), one from the back (Willem de Kooning), and another with the shadow of fingers falling directly across the subject’s face (Virgil Thomson). And his serial portraits of Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns circle his sitters, slicing their three dimensional heads into nine mug shots each. Again and again, Michals opted for something more than a simple, straightforward look, constantly investigating the medium of photography while capturing the individuality of his sitters.
In the past year, Michals has revisited these portraits and added hand written captions on the white borders of the prints, not unlike the anecdotes and scene setting annotations found in his serial works. His comments and stories are generally brief and pithy, with plenty of puns and wry humor. Dustin Hoffman was seen “before he graduated” and Barbra Streisand is “the way she was”. James Coburn was “a bullshitter. He talked too much, too much, too much.” Seen together, the added texts feel a little too ha-ha joky at times, as if Michals was trying too hard to be clever with his words. These pictures are plenty strong enough to stand on their own, and while the inscriptions reveal some personal connections, I don’t think they were entirely necessary.
At a higher level, this series of well-edited gallery shows is incrementally expanding our broader understanding of the photography of Duane Michals, giving us a richer picture of his long term inventiveness. It’s like seeing a well built retrospective chopped into parts, the puzzle slowly coalescing with the addition of each piece. The risk taking compositions, the serial frames and multiple exposures, the annotations and the overpainting, they all start to come together when seen this way, the connecting threads of his long and productive career becoming more visible.
Collector’s POV: The works in this show are priced between $6500 and $38000. Michals’ work is generally available in the secondary markets, with recent prices for single images/multi-image series ranging from roughly $1000 to $34000.
