Duane Michals: It is no accident that you are reading this. I am makin...

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

Duane Michals

ifs-and trust ignorance

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.

Duane Michals

dancer mean needs

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

Duane Michals

saws writing way

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

Duane Michals

vision imagination believe

How foolish of me to believe that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles, and people with a reality itself, and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

Duane Michals

confused reflection believe

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

trying art needs

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.

Duane Michals

magic people thinking

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.

Duane Michals

love-relationship emotion love-you

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?

Duane Michals

photography real art

Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?

Duane Michals

photography forever trying

A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.

Duane Michals

emotion grief photography

Art is really whispering, not shouting.

Duane Michals

shouting whispering art

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

drawing photography people

Most portraits are lies. People are rarely what they appear to be, especially in front of a camera. You might know me your entire lifetime and never reveal yourself to me. To interpret wrinkles as character is insult not insight.

Duane Michals

wrinkles character lying

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.

Duane Michals

writing men father

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

Duane Michals

air people art

Then all at once in late August's heat, tall leafless stalks crowned with iridescent pink and purple blossoms burst from the purgatory in the earth. This arcane act of nature, though perceived by us as ordinary, is a manifestation of Maya's phantom play, the great immensity expressed in every way. My garden is the universe. I am the universe. I am my garden. All things are the same.

Duane Michals

purple garden august

Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.

Duane Michals

photography art moving

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

Duane Michals

nikon insightful photography

We live in a culture where the one who shouts the loudest gets the most attention. It's not in the vulgar, it's not in the shock that one finds art. And it's not the excessively beautiful. It's in between; it's in nuance.

Duane Michals

beautiful culture art

It is no accident that you are reading this. I am making black marks on white paper. These marks are my thoughts, and although I do not know who you are reading this...the lines of our lives have intersected. For the length of these few sentences, we meet here.