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.
Interpretation
Photographs should challenge viewers and present new perspectives rather than simply replicating reality.
In this quote, Duane Michals emphasizes that the true artistry of photography lies in its ability to provoke thought and offer fresh insights into subjects, rather than merely capturing their appearances. He argues that anyone can take a straightforward picture, but it takes skill and creativity to reveal deeper understandings and new ways of seeing people through the lens of a camera.
In practice
A photography exhibit showcasing works that challenge traditional views of 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.
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.
I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him.
Photography has always been a major part of my vision: my excuse for meddling with what the world looks like.
Photography is about finding out what can happen in the frame. When you put four edges around some facts, you change those facts.
At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky.
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
I couldn't talk to people face to face, so I got on stage and started screaming and squealing and twitching.
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