Sally Mann Quotes

24 quotes in 440 categories

• 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.…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best,
• 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…
• 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,…
• I’m past photographing to see what things look like photographed.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths 'told slant,' just as Emily Dickinson commanded.

Browse Sally Mann Quotes by Category