Duane Michals's Quotes

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

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

Art has to address eternal issues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.