Sally Mann Quotes

#1. Time, memory, loss and love are my main artistic concerns, but time, among all of them, becomes the determinant.

Sally Mann

#2. 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.

Sally Mann

#3. 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

#4. The fundamental thing about my personality is that I think I'm an imposter.

Sally Mann

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

Sally Mann

#6. think my father came to believe long ago what Rhett Butler told Scarlett: reputation is something people with character can do without. Character and character

Sally Mann

#7. Weeks go by, and I don't talk to another living soul.

Sally Mann

#8. It's usually so fraught when you're taking a picture. I work with an 8-by-10 view camera and there's a, you know, hood that I put over my head, and it's tricky and complicated.

Sally Mann

#9. 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.

Sally Mann

#10. ...you have to just go on. It's sort of like a bird flying into a plate glass window. And then you just sort of pick yourself up, shake yourself off, and check for anything broken, and go back to work.

Sally Mann

#11. I chose photography over writing. I had to make a living.

Sally Mann

#12. I'm the weird person who completely loved and devoured 'Middlemarch' but who has not finished far shorter and more readable books due to distraction or the fact that by some miracle I am sleeping through the night.

Sally Mann

#13. Matte digital prints are gorgeous, don't you agree? But the glossy digital prints, I just can't stand that paper.

Sally Mann

#14. My main interest was finding boyfriends. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in.

Sally Mann

#15. At the age of 16, my father's father dropped dead of a heart attack. And I think it changed the course of his life, and he became fascinated with death. He then became a medical doctor and obviously fought death tooth and nail for his patients.

Sally Mann

#16. I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there's this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I've also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books.

Sally Mann

#17. I never read about photography.

Sally Mann

#18. 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

#19. Photographs open doors into the past, but they also alloq a look into the future

Sally Mann

#20. I have had a fascination with death, I think, that might be considered genetic for a long time. My father had the same affliction, I guess.

Sally Mann

#21. Though I made my share of mistakes, as all parents do, I was devoted to my kids. I walked them to school every morning and walked back to pick them up at 3.

Sally Mann

#22. I couldn't deal with a normal life.

Sally Mann

#23. Don't get between me and a really good picture in the darkroom, because then I want to go straight to the darkroom and develop it. But once that's done, I'm fine.

Sally Mann

#24. 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

#25. Death makes us sad, but it can also make us feel more alive.

Sally Mann

#26. I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to the emotional core of me.

Sally Mann

#27. I have no animus toward digital, though I still pretty much take everything on a silver-based negative, either a wet plate or just regular silver 8x10. But I've started messing a little bit with scanning the negative and then reworking it just slightly.

Sally Mann

#28. I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.

Sally Mann

#29. I baked bread, hand-ground peanuts into butter, grew and froze vegetables, and, every morning, packed lunches so healthful that they had no takers in the grand swap-fest of the lunchroom.

Sally Mann

#30. You start blocking out things, and that's a really important part of taking a picture is the ability to isolate what you're - what you're concentrating on.

Sally Mann

#31. 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.

Sally Mann

#32. When I read, I take notes and underline things. So reading is a vigorous process for me, but I read in bed. My poor husband is trying to go to sleep, and I'm reaching over him to get the Post-it notes.

Sally Mann

#33. I try and take the commonplace - and some of it is writ large, like death - take the commonplace and make it universally resonant, revelatory, and beautiful at the same time.

Sally Mann

#34. There are a number of things that set Southern artists apart from anyone else. Their obsession with place and their obsession with family.

Sally Mann

#35. You can tell a good ruined lens, right from the get-go ... That's the kind of lens I'm looking for.

Sally Mann

#36. I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory.

Sally Mann

#37. The postmortem readjustment is one that many of us have had to make when our parents die. The parental door against which we have spent a lifetime pushing finally gives way, and we lurch forward, unprepared and disbelieving, into the rest of our lives.

Sally Mann

#38. 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

#39. If I take enough pictures, I'm going to get a good one, and I know not to stop at a bad one.

Sally Mann

#40. When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths 'told slant,' just as Emily Dickinson commanded.

Sally Mann

#41. I taught up in Maine a couple of times and wasn't able to take a single picture. All that blue sky! Ugh. Sparkling clear air, just terrible. I couldn't do it.

Sally Mann

#42. 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

#43. When you look at your life as an artist, you do see that when you get to be 60, you're coming - this is the last chapter.

Sally Mann

#44. This kind of telescopic compassion is not an uncommon phenomenon, and has a close relative in the kindness one sees displayed toward pampered urban household pets, even as, a stones throw away, homeless people sleep on benches.

Sally Mann

#45. I just started taking pictures, and it was - it was an instant love affair. It was just ecstatic.

Sally Mann

#46. 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.

Sally Mann

#47. 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

#48. The two sensibilities, the visual and the verbal, have always been linked for me - in fact, while reading a particularly evocative passage, I will imagine what the photograph I'd take of that scene would look like, even with burning and dodging notes. Maybe everyone does this.

Sally Mann

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

Sally Mann

#50. I guess I have a certain willingness for audacity.

Sally Mann

#51. Eventually, my highbrow parents, who so hated the Eisenhower suburban culture of the 1950s that the only magazines they subscribed to were 'The Atlantic' and 'The New Yorker,' broke down and got 'Life' magazine.

Sally Mann

#52. When we were on the farm, we were isolated, not just by geography but by the primitive living conditions: no electricity, no running water and, of course, no computer, no phone.

Sally Mann

#53. Increasingly, the work I'm doing is in service to an idea rather than just to see what something looks like photographed. I'm trying to explore how I feel about something through photography.

Sally Mann

#54. It didn't help my career to be living in Appalachia.

Sally Mann

#55. The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best,

Sally Mann

#56. When I read something, I picture that scene in that detail. That becomes very similar to composing a photo in real life.

Sally Mann

#57. 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

#58. ...luck, aesthetic luck included, is just the ability to exploit accidents.

Sally Mann

#59. I had written my master's thesis on Ezra Pound on 'The Cantos.' And don't ask me about it. I don't remember anything about it.

Sally Mann

#60. But like a high-strung racehorse who needs extra weight in her saddle pad, I like a handicap and relish the aesthetic challenge posed by the limitations of the ordinary.

Sally Mann

#61. The proverbial hospitality of the South may be selectively extended but it is not a myth.

Sally Mann

#62. I'm just the opposite of a lot of photographers who want everything to be really, really sharp. And they're always, you know, stopping it down to F64.

Sally Mann

#63. 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

#64. I think the media is a fear-mongering operation. They love to rile their viewership up or to scare them.

Sally Mann

#65. 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

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

Sally Mann

#67. The hardest part is setting the camera on the tripod, or making the decision to bring the camera out of the car, or just raising the camera to your face, believing, by those actions, that whatever you find before you, whatever you find there, is going to be good.

Sally Mann

#68. I'm past photographing to see what things look like photographed.

Sally Mann

#69. The whole nature of photography has changed with the advent of a camera in everybody's hand.

Sally Mann

#70. It's not a lack of confidence, because I can't argue with the fact that I've taken some good pictures. But it's just a raw fear that you've taken the last one.

Sally Mann

#71. I work all the time. I never leave home. I mean, I just stay honed in on what's ahead.

Sally Mann

#72. Maintaining the dignity of my subjects has grown to be, over the years, an imperative in my work, both in the taking of the pictures and in their presentation.

Sally Mann

#73. I feel I'm a strange mixture of insecurity and strength. Most of us, probably most people. I'm transferring that same concept to the people I photograph.

Sally Mann

#74. I have a vivid, apocalyptic imagination.

Sally Mann

#75. Writing is much, much harder than taking pictures because you have to man-haul it all out of your insides.

Sally Mann

#76. Very few males have the confidence to appear vulnerable.

Sally Mann

#77. 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.

Sally Mann

#78. 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

#79. I don't like memoirs. I think they're self-serving, and people use them to settle scores, and I really tried not to do that. You have to have a really interesting life to justify memoir, and my life has been pretty ho-hum.

Sally Mann

#80. 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.

Sally Mann

#81. Art is seldom the result of true genius; rather, it is the product of hard work and skills learned and tenaciously practiced by regular people.

Sally Mann

#82. 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

#83. I'm not a good photographer, not a good writer. I'm a pretty regular person whose insecurity is so pervasive that it makes me always feel vulnerable.

Sally Mann

#84. To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about.

Sally Mann

#85. It's a touchy subject, but as a Southerner, you can't ignore our history any more than a Renaissance painter can ignore the Virgin Mary. And it's impossible to drive down a road or eat a vegetable or pass a church without being reminded of slavery.

Sally Mann

#86. 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.

Sally Mann

#87. I don't know what the instinct is, to save every report card, every half-sentence scribbled note, but my mother did it pretty effectively, and I've done it to a fare-thee-well.

Sally Mann

#88. I was just taking pictures to see what they looked like. Just for the fun of it. It wasn't about anything in some cases. Some of them were just about the joy of opening up an aperture and seeing what shows up.

Sally Mann

#89. There is a great quote from a female writer. She said, 'If you don't break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you are not writing well enough. I tend to agree. I think my best pictures come when I push myself.

Sally Mann

#90. I'm not an ardent feminist - well, maybe I am an ardent feminist. I just roll my eyes at the way women are constantly used and how sensitive men are about photographs of themselves.

Sally Mann

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

Sally Mann

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

Sally Mann