List of Duane Michals Quotes

I'm Very Hard On The Art World Just Being A Big Business.

Usually When Painters Use Photographs, They Enlarge And Copy Them And Simply Make A Large, Boring Painting Of A Large, Boring Photograph.

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.

If You Look At A Photograph, And You Think, 'my Isn't That A Beautiful Photograph,' And You Go On To The Next One, Or 'isn't That Nice Light?' So What? I Mean What Does It Do To You Or What's The Real Value In The Long Run? What Do You Walk Away From It With? I Mean, I'd Much Rather Show You A Photograph That Makes Demands On You, That You Might Become Involved In On Your Own Terms Or Be Perplexed By.

I Think Photographers Are Too Polite. There Is Not Enough Anger In Photography; It's Pretty Much Trivialized.

I Think That The Photographer Must Completely Control His Picture And Bring To It All His Personality, And In This Area Most Photographs Never Transcend Being Just Snapshots. When A Great Photographer Does Infuse The Snapshot With His Personality And Vision, It Can Be Transformed Into Something Truly Moving And Beautiful.

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.

I Don't Get Straight People, But I Understand What They Look Like.

I Believe In Invisible; I Do Not Believe In Visible.

To Photograph Reality Is To Photograph Nothing.

You Can Never Capture A Person In Picture, Never. You Might Get An Interesting Expression Or Gesture. I Almost Never Research A Picture Subject Ahead Of Time. I Think Karsh Is Full Of Baloney. Can You Imagine Spending A Whole Week Out In La Jolla With Jonas Salk Soaking Up His Ambiance, Then Wind Up Making Him Look As If He's In The Studio In Ottawa With His Thumb Under His Chin?

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.