39: an evening with Duane Michals

Last night, I had the opportunity to hear Duane Michals speak at RISD. His talk was refreshing and inspiring, and his joy for life is something I think will stay with me for a long time.

If you don’t know Duane Michals, you’ve likely seen his work before. He’s a renowned American photographer from a suburb outside of Pittsburgh who has photographed (to name just a few) Andy Warhol, Meryl Streep, René Magritte, and Marcel Duchamp. He photographed the album art for The Police’s Synchronicity and covered the film production of The Great Gatsby for Vogue. He’s also shot projects for Benson & Hedges, Scientific American, Esquire, Life, Massachusetts Mutual, Estée Lauder, and many more. His ability to adapt his innovative and unconventional approach to the needs of commercial clients is truly remarkable, and I loved the way he effortlessly summed himself up by saying something along the lines of, “I’m the freest person in the world. But I still charge.”

Today, he’s 94 years old and still regularly working and sharing his beautiful outlook on life and human existence, whether it’s through talks like the one he gave last night or on his Instagram account. I loved his presentation at RISD because he didn’t spend a single minute talking about the technical aspects of photography or how he photographs. Instead, he chatted bluntly about life and his reasons for creating, meandering from one story to the next and dropping some of the best one-liners that perfectly summed up his ethos and approach to being a human being. I honestly didn’t know how much I needed to hear his words, and I wish I had recorded them all to revisit later.

Michals’ is widely known for his personal work in which he utilizes sequencing and handwritten text to explore concepts of life, death, memory, and identity. He’s self taught and especially known for his use of multiple exposures (often with his Argus C3 and no light meter). He talked briefly about getting that camera and taking it on a trip to Russia in 1958 where he first began photographing. As he showed work spanning decades, I loved seeing how clearly his style came through in every single piece, whether it was a photo of his relatives taken for himself or something shot on assignment. As he’s said many times in interviews:

True style is inherent. You don’t go looking for it, you discover it.

How it’s discovered, as he also pointed out last night, is through taking risks, jumping into the unknown, and experiencing failure. Below are a few of my favorites from his long career of work. If you’d like to read more about Duane Michals, you can here. This interview from 2022 also does a great job at showing his dynamic personality and highlighting some more of his work.

If someone asked me to sum up what Michals said last night in three words, I would say don’t be bored. Clearly, his own aversion to boredom has done something to keep him young at heart. He talked about how as most people age, they become less inclined to take risks and generally less enchanted or astonished by life. For him, he said, getting older has just allowed him to follow his own truth and be bolder than ever before. As a fellow atheist, I appreciate his outlook on the miraculousness of life and his vaguely spiritual comments (he closed by saying “see you in the next life!”)

This winter has really taken a toll on me mentally and I’ve felt it creatively. That’s been made worse by the homogeneous state of our online world these days, I think. What is so exhausting and depressing to me about social media and the way we’ve sold our attention to the online world is how mind-numbingly boring it all is. Weight loss, AI, and gambling apps make up most of the unavoidable landscape of advertisement. We’re hit with a barrage of fake or AI-generated news on every social media platform that exists. In between all of that, there’s so much derivative, soulless fluff (what we know as content). Sure, there’s some great work out there, but we’re inundated by so much sameness and slop that it can be hard to find sometimes. The internet has become kind of boring, but the tangible world in front of us? That’s never boring.

It’s easy to feel like we have to wait for the right moment to create, or that we need to wait for inspiration to arrive to make work, but as Michals pointed out, there’s no excusable reason to be bored. There’s wonder and amazement to be found everywhere and even sucking at something we might be afraid to try is far better than not doing it at all. Hearing Duane Michals speak was a reminder to be more open creatively to the inspiration all around me, and to take chances and follow my own voice more.