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DUANE MICHALS, The Heisenberg Magic Mirror of Uncertainty, 1998 |
- It is commonplace to say that photography captures a concrete moment, a decisive moment, that an image is worth a thousand words. . .nevertheless your photographs are frequently series of images, sometimes accompanied by texts, explanations, stories surrounding them, as if a single image wasn't enough. Do you not believe in the autonomy of the image?.
I think that different ideas demand different solutions. I came to do sequences because I'm narrative and I tell a story so the 'decisive moment' doesn't work for me all the time. I need a moment before and a moment after to expand the concept so I tend to solve, to take photographs, in whatever way it helps me explain what my particular idea is. Sometimes a photograph is worth a thousand words, but most times the thousand words are lies. The photograph fails for me, the single photograph fails for me you know? Because I don't believe in appearances and so I have to supplement what I'm talking about with text, because I am what I'm talking about very often, like I showed you the picture of my mother and my father and my brother (A Letter From my Father, 1975), and the text I wrote tells about my relationship to my father, something you'll never see in the photograph, so I begun to write. When the photograph fails I begin to write about what you can't see in it.
- In your work there are influences from the Renaissance, from surrealism, a clear tendency towards narrative and certain references to the world of cinema and animation (consecutive sequences that vary little for example). Do you consider yourself a pictorialist photographer, a classic or simply a narrator, something closer to a screenwriter or a film director?
I consider most photographers to be newspaper reporters. They walk around the street with a camera and they photograph whatever they happen to find, but what they found they did not invent. Whether Cartier Bresson was there or not these people would have had their lunch along the Seine. He happened to take their picture, they were historical fact and he very elegantly recorded that fact. In my situation what I photograph is completely out of my imagination, you know like with The Sprit Leaves the Body: I did not happen to walk by and see a man walk away from his body. I think that's what happens when you die so I had to invent the situation, so in that sense I'm much more of a novelist. But that's not to say we shouldn't have newspaper reporters, I just think we should have more novelists.
- You do work for magazines too. . .
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DUANE MICHALS, A Story About a Story, 1995 |
I do. Well I've done everything in photography, absolutely everything. I once made my living as a commercial photographer but I've never been a business. I never had a studio, I have no staff, I do everything by myself, I didn't want to be Richard Avedon, I didn't want to have twenty employees. I see myself as a small industry. . .but doing jobs has given me the luxury to do what I wanted to do for myself so making the money by doing assignments has freed me to do my own private work. Also I'm the complete photographer: there are those photographers who do commercial work and are very successful but they never had a museum show, and there are photographers who've had museum shows but they've never done a commercial job, so I'm one of the few who have always done commercial assignments while doing their own private work. (…)
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