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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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Duane Michals
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: February 18
Drawer
Photographer
McKeesport
Pennsylvania
Duane Steven Michals
Thought
Photograph
Important
Looked
Writing
Father
Much
Write
Men
Tell
Like
Doesn
Order
Photo
Cannot
Express

More quotes by 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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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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To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
Duane Michals
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Taking the photograph is the easiest part for me
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 am interested in the nature of things. The nature of something is quite different from the way it looks.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.
Duane Michals
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Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
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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I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography it's pretty much trivialized.
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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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