Duane Michals Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.

  Duane Michals

  Art, School, Contradiction

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Garden, Purple, August

  7 Copy quote

• One of the marvelous things about film is that if you expose it long enough you're going to get a picture.

  Duane Michals

  Long, Film, Enough

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• 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

  Photography, Drawing, People

  6 Copy quote

• I'm a terrible punster. And I love to rhyme. I just can't help myself.

  Duane Michals

  Helping, Rhyme, Terrible

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• The majority of photographers focus on the obvious. They believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and yet eyes know nothing.

  Duane Michals

  Believe, Eye, Focus

  7 Copy quote

• I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I'm not interested in what things look like.

  Duane Michals

  Sunset, Looks, Photograph

  7 Copy quote

• My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.

  Duane Michals

  Events, Transient

  7 Copy quote

• All good work has magic in it, and addresses the mind in a subtle way.

  Duane Michals

  Magic, Mind, Addresses

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Duane Michals

  Thinking, People, Challenges

  4 Copy quote

• Art has to address eternal issues.

  Duane Michals

  Art, Issues, Addresses

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• Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.

  Duane Michals

  Photograph, Description, Insight

  4 Copy quote

• I often try to photograph things about a person that are not visible.

  Duane Michals

  Trying, Photograph, Persons

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Duane Michals

  Photography, Witty, Memories

  5 Copy quote

• I'm very hard on the art world just being a big business.

  Duane Michals

  Art, World, Just Being

  4 Copy quote

• I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.

  Duane Michals

  Photography, Writing, Bird

  5 Copy quote

• 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?

  Duane Michals

  Thinking, Expression, Wind

  4 Copy quote

• I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it's pretty much trivialized.

  Duane Michals

  Photography, Thinking, Photographer

  4 Copy quote

• To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

  Duane Michals

  Reality, Photograph

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Duane Michals

  Believe, People, Looks

  4 Copy quote

• Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.

  Duane Michals

  Use, Painting, Boring

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Duane Michals

  Passion, People, Accepted

  4 Copy quote

• Taking the photograph is the easiest part for me

  Duane Michals

  Photograph

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• 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.

  Duane Michals

  Beautiful, Running, Real

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• To fulfil a fantasy is the quickest way to destroy it.

  Duane Michals

  Way, Fantasy

  4 Copy quote

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