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

If I was concerned about being accepted, I would have been doing Ansel Adams lookalikes, because that was easily accepted. Everything I…

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

It is no accident that you are reading this. I am making black marks on white paper. These marks are my thoughts,…

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is…

— Duane Michals

I think that the photographer must completely control his picture and bring to it all his personality, and in this area most…

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

You can never capture a person in picture, never. You might get an interesting expression or gesture. I almost never research a…

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about…

— Duane Michals

Art is really whispering, not shouting.

— 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

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s…

— Duane Michals

Then all at once in late August's heat, tall leafless stalks crowned with iridescent pink and purple blossoms burst from the purgatory…

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

“We have a way of making the most extraordinary experience ordinary. We actually work at destroying our miracles. ...”

— Duane Michals

Even in the deepest love relationship - when lovers say 'I love you' to each other - we don't really know what…

— Duane Michals