Duane Michals Quotes

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are

This is not a just image, this is just an image.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

It's not that photography recaptures the world you have been in; more that it creates a new one: photographs are like Post-It Notes reminding us of the deep architectonic forms of space and thought.

Photography is without mercy--though it's nonsense to say it does not lie. Rather, it lies in a particular, capricious way which makes beggars of ministers and gods of cat's meat men.

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

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

The truth is whatever people will believe is the truth.

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone's person.

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.

A thing is not what you say it is or what you photograph it to be or what you paint it to be or what you sculpt it to be. Words, photographs, paintings, and sculptures are symbols of what you see, think, and feel things to be, but they are not the things themselves.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

Is passion what we are? Is that what we are in pictures? Is what we are in pictures almost real? Maybe it's become the most real thing.

Maybe I don't believe things myself, as well. Truth is such a transient thing.

Perception is reality.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

To photograph reality is to photograph nothing.

The camera photographs what's there.

There are many levels of truth.

I think Pirandello had something to say to people about what truth really is.

The image is an image.