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
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.
flower eye glasses
Flowers construct the most charming geometries: circles like the sun, ovals, cones, curlicues and a variety of triangular eccentricities, which when viewed with the eye of a magnifying glass seem a Lilliputian frieze of psychedelic silhouettes.
work
I've done a lot of commercial work. I'm the complete photographer.
absolutely commercial five museum seconds shows survive work
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.
face great magic people powers reproduce seeing takes
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.
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.
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.
way fantasy
To fulfil a fantasy is the quickest way to destroy it.
art world just-being
I'm very hard on the art world just being a big business.