Sally Mann
I remember when the family album came out, people would just knock on our door because they thought they knew us, and that, of course, is one of the great hazards.
The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.
Each time you take a good picture, you have the wonderful feeling of exhilaration... and almost instantly, the flip side. You have this terrible, terrible anxiety that you've just taken your last good picture.
I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do.Collection: Photography
One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.Collection: Art
Photographs open doors into the past, but they also alloq a look into the futureCollection: Inspirational
The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best.Collection: Photograph
Every image is in some way a “portrait,” not in the way that it would reproduce the traits of a person, but in that it pulls and draws (this is the semantic and etymological sense of the word), in that it extracts something, an intimacy, a force.Collection: Way
It's always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary...it never occurred to me to leave home to make art.Collection: Art
Unless you photograph what you love, you're not going to make good art.Collection: Art
As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures, telling our brief story.Collection: Children
I think truth is a layered phenomenon. There are many truths that accumulate and build up. I am trying to peel back and explore these rich layers of truth. All truths are difficult to reach.Collection: Thinking
I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me: my love for the place, for the one man left, for my children and friends and the great green pulse of spring.Collection: Spiritual
Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.Collection: Angel
Photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.Collection: Memories
If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography - the mendacity of photography. It’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it, or it’s not interesting to me.Collection: Photography
The earth doesn’t care where death occurs. ...It’s the artist, by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it, that makes the earth powerful and creates death’s memory. Because the land will not remember by itself, but the artist will.Collection: Memories
The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.Collection: Children
I have nothing but respect for people who travel the world to make art and put exotic Indians in front of linen backdrops, but it's always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary.Collection: Art
What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information.Collection: Photography
To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.Collection: Passion
Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.Collection: Children
It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles.Collection: Airplane
I’m so worried that I’m going to perfect [my] technique someday. I have to say its unfortunate how many of my pictures do depend upon some technical error.Collection: Errors
I can think of numberless males, from Bonnard to Callahan, who have photographed their lovers and spouses, but I am having trouble finding parallel examples among my sister photographers. The act of looking appraisingly at a man, making eye contact on the street, asking to photograph him, studying his body, has always been a brazen venture for a woman, though, for a man, these acts are commonplace, even expected.Collection: Eye
All the good pictures that came so easily now make the next set of pictures virtually impossible in your mind.Collection: Mind
There's always a time in any series of work where you get to a certain point and your work is going steadily and each picture is better than the next, and then you sort of level off and that's when you realize that it's not that each picture is better then the next, it's that each picture up's the ante. And that every time you take one good picture, the next one has got to be better.Collection: Levels
If I could be said to have any kind of aesthetic, it's sort of a magpie aesthetic - I just go and pick up whatever is around. If you think about it, the children were there, so I took pictures of my children. It's not that I'm interested in children that much or photographing them - it's just that they were there.Collection: Children
Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs.Collection: Photography
You can tell a good ruined lens, right from the get-go.... That’s the kind of lens I'm looking for.Collection: Lenses
I don't see many artists who are not trying to bring their work to the public - -to the contrary I see artists nearly desperate to get attention for their art and, failing that, often for themselves.Collection: Art
There are a number of things that set Southern artists apart from anyone else. Their obsession with place and their obsession with family.Collection: Artist
As an artist your trajectory just has to keep going up. the thing that subverts your next body of work is the work you've taken before.Collection: Taken
When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths 'told slant,' just as Emily Dickinson commanded.Collection: Photographer
I’m past photographing to see what things look like photographed.Collection: Past
Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity, and when you're photographing children there's often an abundance of it. I would have an idea of what a photograph would look like and then something would happen - a dog might lumber in and become a critical element. I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.Collection: Dog
These dog bones are just making art the way art should be made, without any overarching reference. Just for fun, if you can imagine that-art for fun.Collection: Dog
There is something about this process, and about the whole 8 x 10 [camera] business, that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I'm always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless. I wanted them to look like snapshots. And some of them did.Collection: Feelings
I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.Collection: Beautiful
My main interest was finding boyfriends. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in.Collection: Eye
Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb—an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt.Collection: Taken