Photographer Michael Scalisi’s Book Follow Me to debut at Ralph Lauren’s RRL Stores
After his book of road-trip photos and essays landed in the hands of a fashion executive, the Bruce Weber–mentored artist found himself with an exclusive vendor for his adventurous, authentically American work.
When artist Michael Scalisi was growing up outside Boston, his adoptive father pressured him to become a postman, like himself. “I would have gone postal!” Scalisi says. “You definitely would have heard about me.”
Instead, Scalisi fled to New York in the late 80s to become an actor. Cast in an occasional good part and tapped for a 501 Jeans TV ad, he soon fell in love with the city that so effortlessly absorbed him. “It was as if I had been born in the wrong place,” reflects Scalisi, who spent his early years in foster homes and an orphanage, “and the first identity assigned me was not truthful.”
One aspect of his identity that Manhattan swiftly revealed to him was his otherworldly beauty. At one time or another, Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel, Duane Michals, “and a dozen or so others” scouted him, usually on the street. But the photographer who re-oriented his life was Bruce Weber. “If I had to point to one person from my youth who had a lasting influence, it was Bruce—the reading lists, the movies to watch, the conversations. Bruce told me I was a writer before I had ever written anything. He told me to buy a camera.” Weber, who hired Scalisi to do voice-overs (“because he sounds like my favorite tough guys”), also arranged, in the early 90s, for him to travel to Cuba. For a year, Scalisi survived on the sales of the black-and-white pictures he brought back from Havana, taken with a $38 Olympus.
By Marcus Andersson.
Scalisi’s rapid mastery of photography—he began to study, deal, exhibit, and collect in the field—in turn awakened in him “a deep passion for art, American art. Ed Ruscha’s paintings practically gut-punched me on first sight.” As a consequence of another chance sidewalk encounter, he worked for a year as Cindy Sherman’s assistant. “Cindy turned around for me the formula of what’s beautiful and what’s ugly. If a person can change the way you see things, they become a Buddha of sorts.” The artist-Buddha who loomed largest on Scalisi’s autodidactic path, however, was Ed Ruscha, whom he finally befriended in 2006. “Ed is by far the most original person I’ve ever met,” Scalisi notes.
Shortly after Scalisi’s first film, Spit—a noir-ish 20-minute comedy short, which he both wrote and directed—debuted at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, he hit the road in a rental car, on a solitary westward quest. “At best you discover your true self; at worst, run out of gas and you sleep in your car for the night,” he observes. Explains Ruscha, “Michael’s a restless adventurer, whether he’s out in urban places or open spaces.”
Scalisi documented the sights of his journey—a one-eyed cowboy guitarist, eerily elegant roadkill, a blazing sunset descending behind a lurid motel sign, a gilt-edged horizon reflected in the sleek silver side of a delivery truck—with a twin-lens Rolleiflex. “Michael likes the good tones of older times,” Ruscha states. “He’s happened upon these things rather than gone searching for them. Basically, what Michael’s saying, is ‘Bring on the world.’”
Inspired by Ruscha’s example, Scalisi decided to self-publish his square-format photographs, along with four short essays typed on an antique Royal, as a book entitled Follow Me. As he was fastidious about the quality of the printing, and he was nearly broke, to pay for the undertaking he worked construction, during the summer of 2010, on Lincoln Center’s renovation. It was he, for instance, who placed the stainless-steel letters alice tully hall on the theater’s façade.
The postscript to this latest chapter of Scalisi’s urban-bohemian folk tale arrived when a finished copy of Follow Me landed in Ralph Lauren executive Alfredo Paredes's hands. The company’s official response was to acquire all copies of the book and, starting on May 17, to sell them exclusively at its RRL shops nationwide. From now on, Ruscha surmises, Scalisi will “be inventing his own future.” Weber envisions Scalisi “at 95” continuing “like a modern-age Neal Cassady” to roam on bikes and in cars, “with a paperback book of poetry in his back pocket.”
Scalisi’s future, at least the very near one, will involve pursuing a Headlight Portraits series (people photographed only by the light of cars), recordings of city sounds on the verge of extinction (such as the clink of coins dropping into pay phones), and another short film, this time semi-autobiographical and tightened to 10 minutes. “Life without a camera seems very dismal to me,” Scalisi remarks. “I have found the greatest joy on both sides of one.”
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