Duane Michals

“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...”

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

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

“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 bird...”

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

“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.”

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

“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 g...”

“In the West, people tend to look at life as spectators, but in the East, people are the thing.”

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

“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...”