Duane Michals
[Photographer, b. 1932, McKeesport, Pennsylvania, lives in New York.]

 Women and men—it’s an impossible subject, because there can be no answers. We can find only bits and pieces of clues. 
 Photographers are always cast as spectators. They’re always walking down the street responding to something they see on the street. They never make things happen themselves. Well, what I’m doing is really creating my own private world and making my own thing happen. I’m not relying on accidental events. 
 The only thing we know for sure is what we experience. If you look at a photograph of somebody crying, you register grief. But in fact, you don’t know what people are experiencing at all. You’re always protecting your version of what that emotion is. What is known is only what I know. The only truth I know is my own experience. I don’t know what it means to be black. I don’t know what it means to be a woman. I don’t know what it means to be Cartier-Bresson. So I have to define my work in terms of my own truth. That’s what the journey is all about, if you are to use your own instincts. The great wonder is that we each have our own validity, our own mysteries. It’s the sharing of those gifts that makes artists artists. 
 If you look at a photograph, and you think, “My isn’t that a beautiful photograph,” and you go on to the next one, or “Isn’t that nice light?” So what? I mean what does it do to you or what’s the real value in the long run? What do you walk away from it with? I mean, I’d much rather show you a photograph that makes demands on you, that you might become involved in on your own terms or be perplexed by. 
 I’m always working on something. I’m not a photographer the moment I pick up the camera. When I pick one up, the hard work’s already been done. The hard part for me is what do I think, what do I care enough about for me to do a photograph? 
 I like photographs to be unresolved. I think everything’s a drama—my standing here is a drama, your sitting there is a drama—and I don’t think photographs should tell you too much. Photographs should make you come to them. They shouldn’t spill the beans. 
 Photography books often have titles like The Photographer’s Eye or The Vision of So and So or Seeing Photographs—as if photographers didn’t have minds, only eyes. 
 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. 
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