Duane Michals Quotes

Author Image

Duane Michals

Profession : Photographer

Birth : February 18, 1932

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Duane Michals

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

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

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