Photographers usually want to photograph facts and things. But I'm interested in the nature of the thing itself. A photograph of someone sleeping tells me nothing about their dream state; a photograph of a corpse tells me nothing about the nature of death. My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the idea that art, particularly photography, should capture deeper meanings beyond mere appearances or facts.
Duane Michals expresses a profound perspective on photography, advocating that it should go beyond simply documenting what is visible. He reflects on the limitations of traditional photography, arguing that it fails to convey the essence of experiences or emotions—like dreams or the true nature of death. Instead, he believes that art should represent life as a dynamic and transient event, thereby capturing the fleeting essence of existence.
In practice
In a photography exhibit, this quote could be used to introduce a series focused on the emotional depth of human experience.
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 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.
A lot of photographers walk around looking for something 'out there,' but I'm very much interested in what's 'in here.'
There are those photographers who have made a whole career doing commercial work but have never had a museum show, and then there are others who've only had museum shows but couldn't survive for five seconds in the real world of photography. But I've done absolutely everything.
Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building—and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.
I believe in low lights and trick mirrors.
If you dont [sic] say what you want, what's the sense of writing?
I have to write and play. If I became an electrician tomorrow, I'd still come home at night and write songs.
There she weaves by night and day, A magic web with colors gay. She has heard a whisper say, A curse is on her if she stay, To look down to Camelot. She knows not what the curse may be, And so she weaveth steadily, And little other care hath she, The Lady of Shalott.
I think what a lot of action movies lose these days, especially the ones that deal with fantasy, is you stop caring at some point because you've lost human scale.
Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.
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