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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

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Duane Michals
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: February 18
Drawer
Photographer
McKeesport
Pennsylvania
Duane Steven Michals
Feel
Meet
Witty
Knot
Feels
Whose
Excitement
Knots
Years
Painting
Corners
Assumptions
Magritte
Men
Memories
Surrender
August
Rene
Looking
Profound
Indulge
Rue
House
Memory
Paintings
Gripped
Stills
Turned
Corner
Contradicted
Still
Photography
Assumption
Surrealist

More quotes by Duane Michals

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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
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I am an expressionist and by that I mean that I'm not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs.
Duane Michals
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A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.
Duane Michals
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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
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Most portraits are lies. People are rarely what they appear to be, especially in front of a camera. You might know me your entire lifetime and never reveal yourself to me. To interpret wrinkles as character is insult not insight.
Duane Michals
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In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.
Duane Michals
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Taking the photograph is the easiest part for me
Duane Michals
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I write in order to express what the photo itself cannot say. A photograph of my father doesn't tell me what I thought of him, which for me is much more important than what the man looked like.
Duane Michals
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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.
Duane Michals
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You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.
Duane Michals
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All good work has magic in it, and addresses the mind in a subtle way.
Duane Michals
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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.
Duane Michals
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I never went to a photography school, which was my saving grace.
Duane Michals
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I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography it's pretty much trivialized.
Duane Michals
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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
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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.
Duane Michals
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Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...' And then do it.
Duane Michals
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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
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To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
Duane Michals
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Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
Duane Michals