Duane Michals Quotes

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.

- Duane Michals

My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.

- Duane Michals

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.

- Duane Michals

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?

- Duane Michals

You can't see fear or lust; you can't photograph someone's anxieties, how disappointment feels. Photographs are approximations.

- Duane Michals

Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it.

- Duane Michals

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.

- Duane Michals

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.

- Duane Michals

I'm very hard on the art world just being a big business.

- Duane Michals

I'm a terrible punster. And I love to rhyme. I just can't help myself.

- Duane Michals

In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.

- Duane Michals

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.

- Duane Michals

The question of truth is forever in the air, and people look for it with particular fervor in art.

- Duane Michals

I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.

- Duane Michals

I've done a lot of commercial work. I'm the complete photographer.

- Duane Michals

Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.

- Duane Michals

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.

- Duane Michals

The majority of photographers focus on the obvious. They believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and yet eyes know nothing.

- Duane Michals

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.

- Duane Michals

I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.

- Duane Michals

A lot of photographers walk around looking for something 'out there,' but I'm very much interested in what's 'in here.'

- Duane Michals

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.

- Duane Michals

Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.

- Duane Michals

Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.

- Duane Michals

All good work has magic in it, and addresses the mind in a subtle way.

- Duane Michals

To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

- Duane Michals

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.

- Duane Michals

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.

- Duane Michals

To fulfil a fantasy is the quickest way to destroy it.

- Duane Michals

Art has to address eternal issues.

- Duane Michals

All good children's books, I think, address metaphysical issues in some kind of way.

- Duane Michals

Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...'; And then do it.

- Duane Michals