Duane Michals 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.

I am an expressionist and by that I mean that I'm not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs.

Don’t try to be an artist. Find the thing within you that needs to be expressed. You might find it is art.

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.

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

Art is really whispering, not shouting.

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.

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

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

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.

I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I'm not interested in what things look like.

Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it.

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

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 never went to a photography school, which was my saving grace.

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

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

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

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

I often try to photograph things about a person that are not visible.

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

To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

I believe in invisible; I do not believe in visible.

I don't get straight people, but I understand what they look like.

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.

Taking the photograph is the easiest part for me

Art has to address eternal issues.

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

One of the marvelous things about film is that if you expose it long enough you're going to get a picture.

You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.

I am interested in the nature of things. The nature of something is quite different from the way it looks.

And in not learning the rules, I was free. I always say, you're either defined by the medium or you redefine the medium in terms of your needs.

Taking photographs and writing is my way of saying I was here, I saw this, I felt this, I heard this.

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

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