Duane Michals

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.

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.

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.

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.

You can't see fear or lust; you can't photograph someone's anxieties, how disappointment feels. Photographs are approximations.

A lot of photographers walk around looking for something 'out there,' but I'm very much interested in what's 'in here.'

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.

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.

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've done a lot of commercial work. I'm the complete photographer.

Usually when painters use photographs, they enlarge and copy them and simply make a large, boring painting of a large, boring photograph.

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.

In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.

Photography is very presumptuous. Photographers are always photographing other people's lives - something they know nothing about - and drawing great inferences into it.

Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.

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.

Photography does deal with 'truth' or a kind of superficial reality better than any of the other arts, but it never questions the nature of reality - it simply reproduces reality. And what good is that when the things of real value in life are invisible?

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

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

I'm a terrible punster. And I love to rhyme. I just can't help myself.

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.

To fulfil a fantasy is the quickest way to destroy it.

The majority of photographers focus on the obvious. They believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and yet eyes know nothing.