Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
Not having gone to photography school, I never learned the rules.
Trust that little voice in your head that says “Wouldn’t it be interesting if...” And then do it.
You go to these schools, and the kids all show you gorgeous prints of water running over pebbles. I’d rather see a not-so-gorgeous mistake of a brilliant idea, an idea that maybe the kid didn’t even know how to solve technically, but who cares, because he’s talking about something incredible. It’s not the medium, it’s the message for me.
Don’t try to be an artist: try to be true. If your vision is honest, art will find you.
Photography is an art, but it will always be a lesser art, always, because of the way in which the majority of photographers use a camera. They lack the most essential ingredient: total invention.
How foolish of me to have believed that it would be that easy. I had confused the appearance of trees and automobiles and people with reality itself and believed that a photograph of these appearances to be a photograph of it. It is a melancholy truth that I will never be able to photograph it and can only fail. I am a reflection photographing other reflections within a reflection. To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.
The craft of photography is to the final image what grammar is to literature.
Photography to me is a matter of thinking rather than looking, it’s revelation, not description.
