Duane Michals
Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...'; And then do it.Collection: Trust
I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.Collection: Anger
Even in the deepest love relationship - when lovers say 'I love you' to each other - we don't really know what we're saying, because language isn't equal to the complexity of human emotions.Collection: Relationship
I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.Collection: Imagination
Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it.
To fulfil a fantasy is the quickest way to destroy it.
I think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody's face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.
To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?
The majority of photographers focus on the obvious. They believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and yet eyes know nothing.
I write in order to express what the photo itself cannot say. A photograph of my father doesn't tell me what I thought of him, which for me is much more important than what the man looked like.
I'm a terrible punster. And I love to rhyme. I just can't help myself.
Art has to address eternal issues.
I'm very hard on the art world just being a big business.
The question of truth is forever in the air, and people look for it with particular fervor in art.
I still find doing portraits a terrific challenge, but even though I've done hundreds of them, I've never stopped questioning the very nature of portraiture because it deals exclusively with appearances. I've never believed people are what they look like and think it's impossible to really know what people are.
Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.
I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.
In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.
My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.
Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.
I've done a lot of commercial work. I'm the complete photographer.
There are those photographers who have made a whole career doing commercial work but have never had a museum show, and then there are others who've only had museum shows but couldn't survive for five seconds in the real world of photography. But I've done absolutely everything.
People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.
The only thing I know anything about are my own fantasies and anxieties. I don't trust my eyes. I consider myself to be a short-story writer.
A lot of photographers walk around looking for something 'out there,' but I'm very much interested in what's 'in here.'
You can't see fear or lust; you can't photograph someone's anxieties, how disappointment feels. Photographs are approximations.
Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.
I already know what things look like - I don't want description. People believe in appearances, and I don't believe in appearances at all.
All good work has magic in it, and addresses the mind in a subtle way.
All good children's books, I think, address metaphysical issues in some kind of way.
I am an expressionist and by that I mean that I'm not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs.Collection: Mean
Don’t try to be an artist. Find the thing within you that needs to be expressed. You might find it is art.Collection: Art
I believe in the invisible. I do not believe in the definitive reality of things around us. For me, reality is the intuition and the imagination and the quiet voice inside my head that says: isn't that extraordinary? The things in our lives are the shadows of reality, just as we ourselves are shadows.Collection: Believe
Taking photographs and writing is my way of saying I was here, I saw this, I felt this, I heard this.Collection: Writing
How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.Collection: Confused
Art is really whispering, not shouting.Collection: Art
Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?Collection: Photography
We live in a culture where the one who shouts the loudest gets the most attention. It's not in the vulgar, it's not in the shock that one finds art. And it's not the excessively beautiful. It's in between; it's in nuance.Collection: Beautiful
Most portraits are lies. People are rarely what they appear to be, especially in front of a camera. You might know me your entire lifetime and never reveal yourself to me. To interpret wrinkles as character is insult not insight.Collection: Lying
A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.Collection: Photography
I am interested in the nature of things. The nature of something is quite different from the way it looks.Collection: Different
Art is not fashionable. That's why fashion and art are two different things. Fashion can never be art because fashion deals with whim, what is temporary, what changes, what is transient, what is now and not now. Art has to deal with issues that are timeless, that never change.Collection: Fashion
And in not learning the rules, I was free. I always say, you're either defined by the medium or you redefine the medium in terms of your needs.Collection: Needs
Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.Collection: Photography
I never went to a photography school, which was my saving grace.Collection: Photography
Flowers construct the most charming geometries: circles like the sun, ovals, cones, curlicues and a variety of triangular eccentricities, which when viewed with the eye of a magnifying glass seem a Lilliputian frieze of psychedelic silhouettes.Collection: Flower
I think that the photographer must completely control his picture and bring to it all his personality, and in this area most photographs never transcend being just snapshots. When a great photographer does infuse the snapshot with his personality and vision, it can be transformed into something truly moving and beautiful.Collection: Beautiful