(http://bombmagazine.org/article/923/duane-michals)
Joseph: I think I already know what you are going to say.
Duane Michals I’ll lie then.
Joseph: When were you born?
Duane Michals February 18, 1932. I am 82 years old.
Joseph: Wow, that is very close to my birthday!, ........well never mind that. On with the questions, Were you self-taught or did you learn from other artist over the years?
Duane Michals I was self-taught.
J I like what you said at the interview in Le Monde that “Photographers look at things but rarely do they question what they see.” Could you tell me more about that?
DM We’re always projecting on the world our own experience. The only truth we know is what we experience. So, when we see a woman crying, we think, “Ah grief.” But we can’t share her grief. We only know how we felt when someone we loved died, when there was a sense of loss. A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.
J What are your ideas of reality? I would like to see if we have the same view on reality?
DM My idea of reality is the interior expression of grief, my anxieties, dreams. We spend a third of our life dreaming but photographers tend not to photograph things we can’t see. Dreams for example. Photographers have a very constipated and narrow vision of what reality is.
J So what are your thoughts on photography?
DM Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Where as in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing. I feel the more a photographer intrudes into the photograph, the more he creates. But people expect less from photography than they do from the other arts. They’re quite happy to simply reproduce someone’s face and they assume that that represents the person and if that person looks attractive, so much the better. It’s the most democratic of all the arts in that anyone can take a photograph or has had their picture taken; so accessible that we don’t demand as much and that’s what makes me angry. Even the pace setters and the professionals in the field, the people who define photography themselves never expect more from the medium than that. Szarkowski, it seems to me, feels that the history of photography has already been defined and it’s simply a matter of refining that definition. Photography is not even a hundred and some years old and it’s already this staid, ossified institution. People are still lighting candles under Stieglitz and under Weston’s green pepper, and rightly so, but let’s get on with it! I’ve seen enough of France at the turn of the century! If photography is a viable living art form, it has to change. It should not be threatened by a handful of non-conformists. The real danger to the medium is the photographer still photographing parking lots in California and being heralded a genius.
J Do you believe in God?
DM Well, first of all, I hate the word “God” like I hate the word “art.” “God” is a useless word, it has no value, no currency, it’s meaningless. Which god? I don’t believe in the personal God. I don’t believe there is a very old man who looks like us and is the boss of the universe. He’s very vindictive. For instance the notion that AIDS is a punishment from God against homosexuals is beyond belief. By the same token, God must hate women because he gives them breast cancer, and blacks because of sickle cell anemia. But unfortunately, even though I don’t believe he exists, I need the idea of a personal God, of a sort of father figure watching over us. Otherwise, we’re quite lonely in the universe. We then become the alpha and the omega of the event. I believe in the Eastern idea that God is pure energy. When I discovered Buddhism, I was appalled, as an ex-Catholic, that the Buddhists didn’t believe in a personal god. I needed that. But I think we are the expression of the cosmic energy. I think it’s consciousness evolving back from pure matter to pure consciousness. It’s the Chinese box and there is no end to it.
J Are you afraid of death?
DM I’m afraid of death on the animal level. Most people are afraid of the pain of death. I read an interesting quote from Milan Kundera and he said what frightens people about death is not so much that they will not have a future anymore but that they have lost their past. I think that’s wonderful because we are our histories. No matter how horrible being is, not being is more frightening. I’m afraid, with all the attendant human things; I don’t want to have cancer. I don’t want to live in unendurable pain for a long time. But I’m intrigued by the question of death. Your birthday and your deathday are your two greatest events. Did I tell you what I want on my tombstone? “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.” And then my name and the dates. I’m fascinated by the transience of death, the act, the change of consciousness. I dealt with death a long time before I got around to sexual issues. I did a book called The Journey of the Spirit After Death in 1970. Loosely based on my idea of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I did Death Comes to a Lady, The Spirit Leaves the Body, Man in the Room, which is about a man who sees this person sitting in the room and is shocked to see him because he’d been to this man’s funeral. And then it turns out in fact, that he’s the one who is dead. The key line is, “Death is nothing that I thought it would be.” I’m hypnotized by the notion of death.
J How do you want to be remembered?
DM People very often say, “How do you want to be remembered,” which I think is a very pretentious question. Why should my prints outlive me? I don’t do my work for a kind of immortality, a record. I do it as a way to understand my experience—always for myself. I’m not concerned with my history after I’m dead, not even in the larger sense of “does one continue to exist?” The Hindus have a very interesting notion that our essence is clear, like a mirror. We are constantly reflecting things we experience and we believe the reflections. So right now I believe I’m Duane Michals, but I know this is my Duane Michals suit . . . We’re not even a deep breath in time. We are made comfortable by our illusions. Everything we think and do is designed to make us feel at ease in a very alien situation. I think that this energy continues, whether it continues as Duane Michals is totally irrelevant. And I’m not interested in my past lives . . .
J You’re more interested in changing the present?
DM Yes, the opportunity of the moment of life.
J In referring to photography you said, “Either one is defined by the medium or one redefines it according to one’s needs. I believe in the spirit more than the eye. It’s all in my head.”
DM That’s true. I feel very strongly that most photographers, in fact most people’s lives are defined by other people. Very few of us really take our lives in our own hands and redefine them. I had to unlearn the first 20 years of my life. In fact, by the time someone’s 20 years old, all they know about life is what they’ve been told about themselves. Then comes the difficult task of eliminating and finding out what is appropriate for them and not their parents. In a similar vein, most photographers are defined by the medium. They take pictures as seen through the eyes of say Robert Frank or Diane Arbus or . . . but they’ve never really redefined the medium in terms of their own needs. There are many, many truths. Woman’s truth is not man’s truth, black truth is not white truth, gay truth is not straight truth. Not the Pope’s or anyone else’s. But the culture doesn’t define us as people who ask these questions.
J You’re not really talking about your work?
DM I’m speaking of life in general, work being part of the process.
J If you could have one more chance to start again from the beginning, would you change anything in your or career?
DM I’ve always felt that lurking inside me was an interesting fashion photographer, which I’ve never really dealt with.
J Well that is different than the answer I was expecting, but oh well. You said before that you put your own life on stage and that you are the hero of your own story
DM We’re all the hero of our own story whether we know it or not. Like this is Chapter 55 of the Duane Michals story. (laughter).
J Well it was great talking with you, you gave me more ways then one to view the world.
DM No problem, the world can be viewed in many prospective's but will always lead back to what it originally was.
