Quotes from Duane Michals

The only thing I know anything about are my own fantasies and anxieties. I don't trust my eyes. I consider myself to be a short-story writer.

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.

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.

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.

I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.

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.

The question of truth is forever in the air, and people look for it with particular fervor in art.

People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.

All good children's books, I think, address metaphysical issues in some kind of way.

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

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

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

Don't try to be an artist. Find the thing within you that needs to be expressed. You might find it is art.

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

Art has to address eternal issues.

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