Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.
Duane Michals
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Duane Michals
Age: 92
Born: 1932
Born: February 18
Drawer
Photographer
McKeesport
Pennsylvania
Duane Steven Michals
West
Look
Looks
Thing
Life
Spectators
People
East
Tend
More quotes by Duane Michals
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
All good work has magic in it, and addresses the mind in a subtle way.
Duane Michals
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
I never went to a photography school, which was my saving grace.
Duane Michals
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
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
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
Trust that little voice in your head that says 'Wouldn't it be interesting if...' And then do it.
Duane Michals
The majority of photographers focus on the obvious. They believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and yet eyes know nothing.
Duane Michals
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
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
To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
Duane Michals
Taking the photograph is the easiest part for me
Duane Michals
I am interested in the nature of things. The nature of something is quite different from the way it looks.
Duane Michals
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
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
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
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
Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
Duane Michals
I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography it's pretty much trivialized.
Duane Michals
