Duane MichalsChance Meeting

I do not walk the streets with my camera looking for life. I am not a reporter. I am not a spectator. I am life. I am it. The images that I see in my mind are infinitely more me and real to me than any chance accidental event I might witness in the streets. I am my own limitations. Every event in my consciousness is stuff for my photographs. At the center of my seeing is my life experience as the event. I can sit in my room and the universe comes to me. I am flux. At the center of my being is nothing. I do not invent ideas any more than I consciously make my fingernails grow. Everything is quite extraordinary but we use all our energies to make things ordinary. Photographers look to much and do not question the very mechanics of their experience. They take it all, for granted, they shouldn't. One must invent photographs that are essentially doomed to failure because they can at best be only approximations, shadows of reality as we are shadow. At this point in my work it seems very natural, that I would have arrived at the concept of sequential stories. Duane Michals