Best 39 quotes of Sally Mann on MyQuotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Every time it’s the same. It’s easy to prove to myself that good pictures are elusive, but I can never quite believe they’re also inevitable. It would be a lot easier for me to believe they were if I also believed that they came as a result of my obvious talent, that I was extraordinary in some way. Artists go out of their way to reinforce the perception that good art is made by singular people, people with an exceptional gift. But I don’t believe I am that exceptional, so what is this that I’m making?

I'm going out on a limb here and say that I believe my morality should have no bearing on the discussion of the pictures I made. ... Oscar Wilde, when attacked in a similar ad hominem way, insisted that it is senseless to speak of morality when discussing art, asserting that the hypocritical, prudish, and philistine English public, when unable to find the art in a work of art, instead looked for the main in it.

Maybe you’ve made something mediocre—there’s plenty of that in any artist’s cabinets—but something mediocre is better than nothing, and often the near-misses, as I call them, are the beckoning hands that bring you to perfection just around the blind corner.

Part of the artist's job is to make the commonplace singular, to project a different interpretation onto the conventional.

That's the way it sometimes goes for me: I start on a new series of pictures and right away, in some kind of perverse bait-and-switch, I get a good one. This freak of a good picture inevitably inspires a cocky confidence, making me think this new project will be a stroll in the park. But, then, after sometimes two or three more good ones, the next dozen are duds, and that cavalier stroll becomes an uphill slog. It isn't long before I have to take a breather, having reached the first significant plateau of doubt and lightweight despair. The voice of that despair suggests seducingly to me that I should give it up, that I'm a phony, that I've made all the good pictures I'm ever going to, and I have nothing more worth saying. That voice is easy to believe, and, as photographer and essayist (and my early mentor) Ted Orland has noted, it leaves me with only two choices: I can resume the slog and take more pictures, thereby risking further failure and despair, or I can guarantee failure and despair by not making more pictures. It's essentially a decision between uncertainty and certainty and, curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.

The act of looking appraisingly at a man, studying his body and asking to photograph him, is a brazen venture for a woman; for a male photographer, these acts are commonplace, even expected.

To identify a person as a Southerner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative but that it is also impossibly present. Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade defiance play out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty.