Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall

This cover illustration is a largish detail of one photo (The title, referential in nature, is The deep air, written in Duane Michals’ cursive hand), image #17 of 27, from his slim book-length sequence, The Journey of the Spirit after Death, published in 1971.
Michals is a pioneer of sequential, story-telling photography, metaphysical in that the most rigorous, unforgiving descriptor of the world – the straight, unmanipulated photograph – is employed to question the nature of ‘objective’ reality, and our inability to capture or describe it in anything more than the most reductive, superficial sense.
In terms of the image’s use as a cover for Foundlings, it is interesting to note that The Journey of the Spirit after Death was published in 1971, two years after the Stonewall riots. Michals, a gay man, born in 1932 and raised in the conservative, steel-mill city of Mckeesport PA (as was fellow artist, Andy Warhol), was not publicly out at the time, and remained closeted for some years afterward.
To view an uncropped version of Duane Michals’ photograph, click here.