Sally Mann Quotes

Quotes about:

• I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do.

  Sally Mann

  Photography, Thinking, People

  140 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Art, Love You, Careers

  100 Copy quote

• Photographs open doors into the past, but they also alloq a look into the future

  Sally Mann

  Inspirational, Photography, Past

  81 Copy quote

• The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best.

  Sally Mann

  Photograph

  68 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Way, Portraits, Photographer

  17 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Art, Philosophy, Home

  55 Copy quote

• Unless you photograph what you love, you're not going to make good art.

  Sally Mann

  Art, Love You, Photograph

  "The Dichotomy of Sally Mann: “The Family and the Land” at the Photographers’ Gallery, London" by Marina Cashdan, www.huffingtonpost.com. August 10, 2010.

  41 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Children, Rivers, Childhood

  15 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Thinking, Trying, Layers

  45 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Spiritual, Children, Spring

  60 Copy quote

• Photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.

  Sally Mann

  Memories, Past, Creating

  32 Copy quote

• Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.

  Sally Mann

  Angel, Serendipity, Might

  49 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Photography, Interesting, Photographer

  "Dog Bone Prints: Sally Mann". Art in the Twenty-First Century Interview, art21.org. September 2001.

  44 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Memories, Powerful, Writing

  45 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Art, Philosophy, People

  44 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Children, Light, Expression

  Sally Mann (2015). “Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs”, p.172, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Photography, Different, Pieces

  32 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Children, Memories, Thinking

  36 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Passion, Heart, Eye

  Sally Mann (2015). “Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs”, p.165, Hachette UK

  7 Copy quote

• It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles.

  Sally Mann

  Airplane, Garden, Versailles

  31 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Errors, Perfect, Technique

  31 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Eye, Men, Thinking

  25 Copy quote

• All the good pictures that came so easily now make the next set of pictures virtually impossible in your mind.

  Sally Mann

  Mind, Next, Impossible

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Levels, Next, Photographer

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Sally Mann

  Children, Thinking, Photographer

  "Dog Bone Prints: Sally Mann". Art in the Twenty-First Century Interview, art21.org. September 2001.

  22 Copy quote

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