Top 40 Duane Michals Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Trust that little voice in your head that says ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if...’; And then do it.”

— Duane Michals

Featured in: Curiosity Quotes, Quotes About Trust, Ignorance Quotes

2. “Don’t try to be an artist. Find the thing within you that needs to be expressed. You might find it is art.”

— Duane Michals

3. “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.”

— Duane Michals

4. “Taking photographs and writing is my way of saying I was here, I saw this, I felt this, I heard this.”

— Duane Michals

5. “We live in a culture where the one who shouts the loudest gets the most attention. It’s not in the vulgar, it’s not in the shock that one finds art. And it’s not the excessively beautiful. It’s in between; it’s in nuance.”

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

7. “And in not learning the rules, I was free. I always say, you’re either defined by the medium or you redefine the medium in terms of your needs.”

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

9. “To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.”

— Duane Michals

10. “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.”

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

13. “Art is really whispering, not shouting.”

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

16. “I often try to photograph things about a person that are not visible.”

— Duane Michals

17. “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.”

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

19. “A photograph of a woman crying tells me nothing about grief. Or a photograph of a woman ecstatic tells me nothing about ecstasy. What is the nature of these emotions? The problem with photography is that it only deals with appearances.”

— Duane Michals

20. “Art is not fashionable. That’s why fashion and art are two different things. Fashion can never be art because fashion deals with whim, what is temporary, what changes, what is transient, what is now and not now. Art has to deal with issues that are timeless, that never change.”

— Duane Michals

21. “You can’t teach art, so ART SCHOOL is a contradiction in terms.”

— Duane Michals

22. “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.”

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

24. “I believe in invisible; I do not believe in visible.”

— Duane Michals

25. “I am interested in the nature of things. The nature of something is quite different from the way it looks.”

— Duane Michals

26. “Flowers construct the most charming geometries: circles like the sun, ovals, cones, curlicues and a variety of triangular eccentricities, which when viewed with the eye of a magnifying glass seem a Lilliputian frieze of psychedelic silhouettes.”

— Duane Michals

27. “I don’t get straight people, but I understand what they look like.”

— Duane Michals

28. “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?”

— Duane Michals

29. “I am an expressionist and by that I mean that I’m not a photographer or a writer or a painter or a tap dancer, but rather someone who expresses himself according to his needs.”

— Duane Michals

30. “I think photographers are too polite. There is not enough anger in photography; it’s pretty much trivialized.”

— Duane Michals

31. “Art has to address eternal issues.”

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

33. “I never photograph sunsets and I never photograph moonrises. I’m not interested in what things look like.”

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

35. “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.”

— Duane Michals

36. “I’m very hard on the art world just being a big business.”

— Duane Michals

37. “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.”

— Duane Michals

38. “Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and more places. Photography has to transcend description. It has to go beyond description to bring insight into the subject, or reveal the subject, not as it looks, but how does it feel?”

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

40. “One of the marvelous things about film is that if you expose it long enough you’re going to get a picture.”

— Duane Michals

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

— Duane Michals

42. “Photography is essentially an act of recognition by street photographers, not an act of invention. Photographers might respond to an old man’s face, or an Arbus freak, or the way light hits a building – and then they move on. Whereas in all the other art forms, take William Blake, everything that came to that paper never existed before. It’s the idea of alchemy, of making something from nothing.”

— Duane Michals

43. “Taking the photograph is the easiest part for me.”

— Duane Michals