Although more known for his images of famous actors, writers, and visual artists, Childers has produced other works that take their inspiration directly from the performing body. In these photographs of unknown merrymakers, he brings the same sensitivity to his subjects as in his more recognizable sitters, capturing both persona and personality through gestures and telling details.
During the 1970s, Michael Childers was a photographer for Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, giving him access to the artist and his famous New York studio, The Factory. Childers’s photographs of Warhol from the 1970s use subtle strategies of gesture, props, and doubling devices to go beyond the inscrutable icon that the artist cultivated, bringing to light his complicated personality below the surface persona. Similarly, Childers photographed the avant-garde artists and other creative, often flamboyant, performers who were cast in Warhol’s films and were encouraged to use his studio as a living experiment in alternative values.
As did Warhol’s artwork, Childers’s portraits from the drag ball in Los Angeles and The Factory in New York anticipate our present era of transgender awareness and gender fluidity. As a participant in both The Factory and the entertainment culture of Los Angeles, Childers developed a photographic language to embrace the radical potential of those who dared to use their own bodies as a way to reinvent our understanding of gender. He enlarges our understanding of the cultural revolution Warhol promoted through photographs that inform and delight as they remind us of the history behind our current moment.
This exhibition was presented at Palm Springs Art Museum in 2016 and curated by Victoria Taormina and Mara Gladstone.
