Cavafy strikes a pose: Duane Michals’s Cavafy photobooks

This article is the first critical and comparative assessment of Duane Michals’s two Cavafy photobooks, Homage to Cavafy (1978) and The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy (2007). Michals’s photo-sequences in these two books are not illustrations of Cavafy’s poetry, nor do they attempt to be faithful to their content. In Adventures Michals creates a ‘cinematic’ role for the poet, impersonated by the actor Joel Grey; however, Michals’s version of Cavafy only bears vague resemblance to the historical character. As I argue, Michals’ digression from biographical accuracy aims at highlighting the queer aspect of the poet rather than just illustrating a gay life, thus showcasing the open-endedness of Cavafy’s life and texts as spaces for queer self-genealogy. As queer fictions, Michals’s photographs display a reading of Cavafy that does not measure itself against the aesthetic impact of his poetry, but grounds itself on the political and ideological repercussion of his sexual sensibility.