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"You can take the kid out of McKeesport, but you can't take McKeesport out of the kid," Duane Michals said Thursday night, after the laughter died down.

Before a standing-room crowd in the theater at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art, Michals had just referred to hand-tinting pictures using a seven-letter word ending in "job."

"I'm sorry," said Michals, 78, a 1949 graduate of McKeesport Technical High School and a member of the school's Alumni Hall of Fame. "If I've offended anybody, I meant to."

. . .

Michals, whose critically acclaimed portraits and photo sequences have been featured in the world's top magazines and art galleries, delivered the third in a series of talks called "What Are Museums For?"

During a wide-ranging conversation with Lynn Zelevansky, director of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Michals discussed his childhood in McKeesport, his early friendship with Pittsburgh native Andy Warhol, and his own creative process.

And to the many art students in the audience, Michals said one secret of achievement is repeated failure.

"If you become a success too soon, you become trapped," he said. "So fail --- please fail. You have to be ambitious. The Hindus say you have to want success just enough. If you want it too much, you end up becoming a Republican and moving to California. If you want it too little, you wind up living in a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side."

. . .

Michals grew up in McKeesport, son of a steelworker at U.S. Steel's Duquesne Works. As a boy, he rode the streetcar from McKeesport to Oakland to take Saturday art classes at the Carnegie Museum. Walks through the museum's galleries of painting and sculpture inspired what he called a lifelong love of beauty.

"When you grow up in a steel mill family, there isn't much to read," Michals said. "We had the phone book, maybe, and that's it. And that's the thing about museums --- for people who have ordinary lives, museums are repositories of amazement."

(One of his classmates during those Saturday sessions, Michals said, was a gifted teen-aged artist named Edgar Munhall: "I thought to myself, 'How rude is that? Not only is he talented, they named a town after him.'" Munhall later became the first curator of New York's Frick art collection.)

. . .

Funny and precocious, Michals earned the childhood nickname "Sonny" and the enmity of other kids whose parents lectured them, "Why can't you be like Sonny?" "I was a nice kid," he said, "which was the kiss of death."

Though Michals dated girls throughout high school, he gradually came to the realization that he was gay. "In those days, being gay was the worst thing that could happen to you," he said.

"For a lot of people, it still is ... but you have to learn that the world does not come in one kind, 'White,' and one size, 'Regular.' Being gay is just part of the sexual spectrum." Michals this year celebrated his 50th anniversary with his partner.

Upon graduation from Tech High, Michals applied for scholarships to Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), an art school in Cleveland and the University of Denver. The Colorado school accepted him.

"I thought, 'Wow! Colorado! Out west! Cowboys!" Michals said. "My domestic situation at home wasn't that great. One thing my father later said to me, that I thought was very sympathetic, was 'I understand why you would to go to school a thousand miles away.'"

. . .

After receiving his degree and serving a two-year hitch in the Army, Michals went to New York to pursue a career in advertising and commercial design. There, he became friends with another displaced Pittsburgher, Andy Warhol, whose illustrations were getting rave reviews.

"Andy in those days was the best example of a nerd," Michals said. "Plenty of zits, losing his hair, fey --- the last person in the world you'd expect to become an icon. But he was very nice, and very easy to talk to."

Michals became friends with Warhol's mother --- thanks to his own grandparents, Michals could speak Slovak with her --- and when Michals lost touch with Warhol, he was planning to open an antique store.

. . .

Several years later, after Michals had begun his photography career, he received an assignment to profile several "up-and-coming artists" for Mademoiselle magazine.

One of the subjects was Warhol. "I said, 'Andy Warhol? Really?'" Michals remembered. "He had completely reinvented himself. He was dressed in black, wearing that wig, had rock music blaring, and as he became famous he became less and less accessible."

Michals had first begun taking pictures as a lark. A friend who owned an early 35-mm camera taught him a few basic tricks: "He said, 'If you're outside and it's sunny, set this dial to 16 and this dial to 500.'" Acquaintances saw Michals' work, were impressed, and began hiring him for jobs.

"Little by little, I learned on the job by doing assignments," Michals said. "Luckily, I didn't know anything, because if I did, I would have been too scared to try."

. . .

In the 1960s, Michals held his first gallery exhibition. Some people were offended by his early work. Rather than using the gritty, realistic style then in vogue, Michals was staging photos to tell stories, doing trick exposures, and writing sentences and paragraphs to explain what was going on.

"I have a very literal, 'See Dick, See Jane' mind," he said. "I'm not an intellectual." When other photographers wanted to illustrate stories about death, Michals said, they would take arty photos of cemeteries or women crying. "I wanted to take a picture of someone's soul leaving their body," he said.

Michals continues to take photo commissions --- his most recent session was a series of photos with comedian Michael Richards, who played Kramer on "Seinfeld" --- and describes himself as a voracious reader, art collector and museum patron. "I really need beauty now, in my old age," he said. "It sustains me."

. . .

Michals is also working on his memoirs, incorporating letters he wrote to friends in McKeesport while he was in the Army.

The most important lesson he can give students, Michals said, is that they need to become passionate about something.

"When you graduate from school, no one's going to give you assignments," he said. "You've got to energize yourself. The world is animated by this huge ball of creative energy. We've got to tap into that energy --- we are the energy."

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