96 Quotes by Sally Mann

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

How can a sentient person of the modern age mistake photography for reality? All perception is selection, and all photographs – no matter how objectively journalistic the photographer’s intent – exclude aspects of the moment’s complexity. Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time’s continuum.