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.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the intricate and captivating patterns found in flowers, emphasizing their artistic beauty.
Duane Michals' quote reflects on the enchanting geometrical shapes that flowers exhibit, likening them to various forms and structures that can be appreciated when examined closely. Through the lens of a magnifying glass, the flowers' intricate details reveal a surreal tapestry of shapes and colors, transforming the ordinary into an extraordinary visual experience that captivates the observer's imagination.
In practice
This quote can be used in a nature photography exhibit to emphasize the beauty of floral designs.
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.
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.
Photography is a very lonely medium. There’s a kind of beautiful loneliness in voyeurism. And that’s why I’m a photographer.
I don't care much about music. What I like is sounds.
A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.
I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.
A product can live on one great idea. An interior needs 1,000 great ideas to really live, which makes interior design a whole orchestration of this art of juxtaposition, placement, and combination.
It is only by loving nature, and going to her for everything, that good work can be done; but then we must look to her for the materials for pictures, not for pictures themselves. It is nature filtered through the mind and fingers of the artist that produces art, and the quality of the pictures depends on the fineness of that filter.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.