Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]
I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I’m not interested in what things look like.
The camera is like a typewriter, in the sense in which you can use the machine to write a love letter, a book, or a business memo.
You can never capture a person in picture, never. You might get an interesting expression or gesture. I almost never research a picture subject ahead of time. I think Karsh is full of baloney. Can you imagine spending a whole week out in La Jolla with Jonas Salk soaking up his ambiance, then wind up making him look as if he’s in the studio in Ottawa with his thumb under his chin?
One of the marvelous things about film is that if you expose it long enough you’re going to get a picture.
Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
What’s important to me is the idea. It doesn’t have to be a perfect, Ansel Adams,‘f64’ picture.
Most portraits are lies. People are rarely what they appear to be, especially in front of a camera. You might know me your entire lifetime and never reveal yourself to me. To interpret wrinkles as character is insult not insight.
Get Weston off your back, forget Arbus, Frank, Adams, White, don’t look at photographs. Kill the Buddha.