Sabine Mirlesse Q: You once said that if photography is a viable living art form then it has to change. Do you think it’s changed in the last several decades?
Duane Michels: No, not that much. What would those changes be? Large photographs? If you look at photography today, photographs have simply become large. This is the age of museum photographs. I wrote 32 aphorisms in my book and one of them is that I’d never trust any photograph that is so large it could only fit in a museum. Those photographs are only designed for museums or homes. They aren’t photographs anymore. If you took an Andreas Gursky picture in a hotel lobby and made it into an 8x10—it’s an annual report photograph. It only has any power because of the size. That’s why people like Wolfgang Tillmans will photograph their breakfast with a little camera and then make it into a 10-foot photograph. Who gives a fuXK about what he had for breakfast? These are stylistic ticks. The digital has changed the paradigms of photography. I had an opening in Boston and this woman had a little camera with her and kept exclaiming, Everything is a photograph! That’s the problem. The bar has been lowered so much in photography now...