One of his greatest inspirations, Walt Whitman, has been a part of Duane Michals' life from a very young age. "Whitman was so wonderful for me. He's one of the few people - like Magritte - who have really influenced me," he says. "When I was 17, my mother worked in a department store and I went to the bookstore and I found this copy of Leaves of Grass, which was so extraordinary. It wasn't the kind of poetry you read in high school...he addressed issues, he talked to you directly - that's where I get that talking to you directly from." Recently, Michals published a photographic interpretation of Whitman's masterpiece Leaves of Grass entitled Tribute, Walt Whitman, which used photos of a single model throughout the book, as well as props that included a giant book with Whitman's words written in Michals' own hand.

14. Whoever You Are 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 "I wanted to get the writing, his writing, into the photographs, and I had this wonderful big book which I found at an auction in the country for two bucks," he recalls. "I would do these series where there'd be a closeup of the book and you would read the text, and the camera kept retreating and then eventually it would become a landscape...it keeps changing and then you end up with the person being diminished and he becomes part of a landscape. It was a wonderful freedom for me to get his writing inside my photographs and I'm very thrilled with that."