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.
Art is a never-ending dance of illusions.
That's the thing about fiction writers: what seems alarming or particular or perverse about them is simply the shape of their brain - they cannot be otherwise.
Poverty is the discoverer of all the arts.
Good taste is the enemy of creativity.
I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.
Photography helps people to see.
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