Duane Michals

“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.”

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

“My work is about my life as an event, and I find myself to be very temporal, transient.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“I believe in the imagination. What I cannot see is infinitely more important than what I can see.”

“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.”

“All good work has magic in it, and addresses the mind in a subtle way.”

“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?”

“Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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