Duane Michals

Most photographs, to me, are description, but they lack insight.

Even in the deepest love relationship - when lovers say 'I love you' to each other - we don't really know what we're saying, because language isn't equal to the complexity of human emotions.

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

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

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

I've done a lot of commercial work. I'm the complete photographer.

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

I write in order to express what the photo itself cannot say. A photograph of my father doesn't tell me what I thought of him, which for me is much more important than what the man looked like.

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

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

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.

The majority of photographers focus on the obvious. They believe and accept what their eyes tell them, and yet eyes know nothing.

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.

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

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

To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

The question of truth is forever in the air, and people look for it with particular fervor in art.

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

All good children's books, I think, address metaphysical issues in some kind of way.

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.