What are you shooting with
these days?
With a lot of courage.
At this age, I have a full-time assistant,
and I have a little group, and we’ve been
making movies for the last three or four
years. I call us the “19th Street Players.”
I’m shooting with the top-of-the-line
Canon. The camera is so amazing, we
shoot everything with it. I’ve shown
them in movie theaters and large screens
in museums, and it holds up beautifully.
The quality is stunning.
We have a sound guy come in. I’m
very much into production qualities. I
was never a darkroom freak, though
I did all my own printing and lots of
tricky stuff, including double exposures:
The print of the guy on a subway plat-
form who becomes a star took a lot of
time in the darkroom to figure out.
After many years, I thought, if I could
find somebody who could print better
than I could, I’d get out of the dark-
room. And I did.
If I’m using old negatives, I’ll still have
them done on silver-gelatin. But all the
new stuff is digital, which I love.What do you see looking back at
Empty New York that you didn’t
see at the time?I don’t remember taking most of those
pictures, but the book has such a sense
of the time. There’s huge nostalgia in
those pictures.
These pictures were never a destina-
tion, but they liberated me. Luckily, I
didn’t come up through the photo ranks
when I began to do sequences, so I didn’t
have to unlearn anything.
Then I began to write with pho-
tographs. I’m a storyteller, and I’m a
bullshitter. I’m very verbal. That’s one
gift my mother said my dad gave me,
“the gift of gab.”
I was liberating myself from the
restrictions of photography by writing.“Empty New York,” by Duane Michals, 1964
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