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.
The majority of photographers focus on the obvious. They believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and yet eyes know nothing.
To fulfil a fantasy is the quickest way to destroy it.
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.
Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.
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.
A lot of photographers walk around looking for something 'out there,' but I'm very much interested in what's 'in here.'
To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.
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.
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 oth...
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 des...
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.
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 ...
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...
I've done a lot of commercial work. I'm the complete photographer.
