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
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.
art air people
The question of truth is forever in the air, and people look for it with particular fervor in art.
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.
passion people accepted
If I was concerned about being accepted, I would have been doing Ansel Adams lookalikes, because that was easily accepted. Everything I did was never accepted...but luckily for me, my interest in the subject and my passion for the subject took me to the point that I wasn't wounded by that, and eventually, people came around to me.
people looks
I don't get straight people, but I understand what they look like.
believe people looks
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.
photography drawing people
Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it.
thinking people magic
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.
people looks west
In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.
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.
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.
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.