A lot of photographers walk around looking for something 'out there,' but I'm very much interested in what's 'in here.'
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of introspection and personal perspective in photography.
Duane Michals highlights a shift in focus from external elements to internal experiences in the art of photography. While many photographers seek inspiration from the outside world, Michals suggests that true artistry comes from exploring one's emotions, thoughts, and personal vision, thereby creating a deeper and more authentic representation of reality.
In practice
During an art exhibition discussing the meaning of self-portraiture.
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.
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.
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.
And thus it came to pass that the Silmarils found their long homes: one in the airs of heaven, and one in the fires of the heart of the world, and one in the deep waters.
There will be no new music until it's good enough and until I'm ready.
You don't have to know anything about a subject as long as you use common sense and imagination, plus enthusiasm! I use all periods of design in my work, for, after all, decorative styles are simply indications of a manner of living.
I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one.
When anyone seriously pursues an art - painting, poetry, sculpture, composing - over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief, and that descent, resisted so long proves invigorating. . . . As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.
Music played a large role in the survival of the black people in America — that and a sense of humor that just couldn't be enslaved.
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