Duane Michals at Sidney Janis - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, April, 1997 by Jonathan Goodman

Duane Michals's recent photographic project "Salute, Walt Whitman" consists of both single images and series that sometimes literally illustrate the poet's verse. Michals first read Whitman's great compilation Leaves of Grass while in high school, and the book has clearly meant a great deal to him. This gathering of photographs (also published in book form) incorporates extracts from Whitman's poetry and celebrates, as Whitman did, the physical beauty of the male form.

Michals's black-and-white photographs typically show a handsome young athlete in rural surroundings. In one image, inspired by lines from "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," Michals stays close to the text. The poem, written beneath the image, reads in part, "When the lilac-scent was in the air and Fifth month grass was growing," and goes on to describe a pair of birds and their nest -- a symbol of fidelity. The quotation ends, "And every day I, a curious boy, never too close, never disturbing them,/Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating." Michals's photograph presents the youth looking off into an unknown distance. Directly in front of his face is a lilac, its delicate forms evoking the poem's particulars and also serving as a likely metaphor for the physical and metaphysical bonds of homosexual love.

This portrait is representative of Michals's approach, which tends to teeter precariously between affection and sentimentality. Some images, for example one of the youth naked, splashing water in a lake, are coy to the point of preciosity. But others, the series works especially, generate something of the joyous pleasure that the poet radiated himself. Michals's series tend to take a single motif -- the youth before a waterfall, reading a poem in an oversized book -- and offer it in three versions: from afar, from a middle distance and close up. What results is a sudden complexity, as we compare the images, their variations of composition and detail, and our differing responses.

In one particularly strong work, the young man regards us through superimposed lines in an old-fashioned typeface: the first page of the first edition of Leaves of Grass. His serious gaze seems to embody Whitman's opening words: I celebrate myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." Throughout the photographs in this exhibition, Michals attempts to capture a similar tone of intimate informality. If he strays at times into sentiment, we must remember that Whitman himself was given to sentiment. The poet's view of things is accurately paralleled in Michals's affectionate photos.