Quotes by Duane Michals

About Duane Michals:

Duane Michals is an American photographer. Michals's work makes innovative use of photo-sequences, often incorporating text to examine emotion and philosophy.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Duane Michals

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

Duane Michals

Art has to address eternal issues.

Duane Michals

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

Duane Michals

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

Duane Michals

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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 invisi...

Duane Michals

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

Duane Michals

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

Duane Michals

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

Duane Michals

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

Duane Michals

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

Duane Michals

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

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

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.

Duane Michals

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

Duane Michals

Author Bio

  • NameDuane Michals
  • DescriptionAmerican photographer
  • BornFebruary 18, 1932
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPhotographer