Duane Michals Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.'”

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