Duane Michals
Duane Michals
Duane Michalsis an American photographer. Michals's work makes innovative use of photo-sequences, often incorporating text to examine emotion and philosophy...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth18 February 1932
CountryUnited States of America
corpse dream facts interested life nature photograph sleeping tells work
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.
consider fantasies trust
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.
address good issues
All good children's books, I think, address metaphysical issues in some kind of way.
A lot of photographers walk around looking for something 'out there,' but I'm very much interested in what's 'in here.'
fear photograph
You can't see fear or lust; you can't photograph someone's anxieties, how disappointment feels. Photographs are approximations.
became bought early maybe museum nobody people rewards
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.
photography witty memories
If I indulge myself and surrender to memory, I can still feel the knot of excitement that gripped me as I turned the corner into Rue Mimosas, looking for the house of Rene Magritte. It was August, 1965. I was 33 years old and about to meet the man whose profound and witty surrealist paintings had contradicted my assumptions about photography.
use painting boring
Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.
art air people
The question of truth is forever in the air, and people look for it with particular fervor in art.
believe eye focus
The majority of photographers focus on the obvious. They believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and yet eyes know nothing.
photograph description insight
Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.
helping terrible rhyme
I'm a terrible punster. And I love to rhyme. I just can't help myself.
photography thinking photographer
I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.
thinking people challenges
I still find doing portraits a terrific challenge, but even though I've done hundreds of them, I've never stopped questioning the very nature of portraiture because it deals exclusively with appearances. I've never believed people are what they look like and think it's impossible to really know what people are.