Sally Mann Quotes & Sayings

I chose photography over writing. I had to make a living. — Sally Mann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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? — Sally Mann

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

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

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

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

The fundamental thing about my personality is that I think I'm an imposter. — Sally Mann

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

Photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories. — Sally Mann

As for me, I see both beauty and the dark side of the things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as the well. And I see them at the same time, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means "beauty tinged with sadness," for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing. — Sally Mann

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

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

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

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

I'm past photographing to see what things look like photographed. — Sally Mann

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

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. — Sally Mann

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

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

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

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

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

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

The writer Lee Smith, who once had a New York copy editor query in the margin of her manuscript "Double-wide what?" tells a perfectly marvelous, spot-on story about Eudora Welty when she came to Hollins College, where Smith was a student. Welty read a short story in which one female character presents another with a marble cake. In the back of the audience Smith noted a group of leather-elbowed, goatee-sporting PhD candidates, all of whom were getting pretty excited. One started waving his hand as soon as she stopped reading and said, "Miz Welty, how did you come up with that powerful symbol of the marble cake, with the feminine and masculine, the yin and the yang, the Freudian and the Jungian all mixed together like that?" Smith reported that Welty looked at him from the lectern without saying anything for a while. Finally she replied mildly, "Well, you see, it's a recipe that's been in my family for some time. — Sally Mann

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

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

The proverbial hospitality of the South may be selectively extended but it is not a myth. — Sally Mann

I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us further away. — Sally Mann

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

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

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

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

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

Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn't diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished. — Sally Mann

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

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. — Sally Mann

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

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. — Sally Mann

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

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

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

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

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

The whole nature of photography has changed with the advent of a camera in everybody's hand. — Sally Mann

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will confess that in the interest of narrative I secretly hoped I'd find a payload of southern gothic: deceit and scandal, alcoholism, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land, abandonments, blow jobs, suicides, hidden addictions, the tragically early death of a beautiful bride, racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of a prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder. If any of this stuff lay hidden in my family history, I had the distinct sense I'd find it in those twine-bound boxes in the attic. And I did: all of it and more. — Sally Mann

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

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

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

I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory. — Sally Mann

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

I couldn't deal with a normal life. — Sally Mann

It didn't help my career to be living in Appalachia. — Sally Mann

I smoked, I drank, I skipped classes, I snuck out, I took drugs, I stole quarts of ice cream for my dorm by breaking into the kitchen storerooms, I made out with my boyfriends in the library basement, I hitchhiked into town and down I-91, and when caught, I weaseled out of all of it . . . There is no need to switch on the fog machine of ambiguity around these facts: I was still a problem child. — Sally Mann

The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best, — Sally Mann

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

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

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

...luck, aesthetic luck included, is just the ability to exploit accidents. — Sally Mann

I never read about photography. — Sally Mann

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

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

I just started taking pictures, and it was - it was an instant love affair. It was just ecstatic. — Sally Mann

The Texas Republic, whose constitution expressed an overheated enthusiasm for America's peculiar institution, had been created in 1836 in part as a way for slave-owners to keep their human property by effectively seceding from Mexico where slavery was illegal. These are well-known facts, except possibly in Texas, — Sally Mann

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

I guess I have a certain willingness for audacity. — Sally Mann

I have a vivid, apocalyptic imagination. — Sally Mann

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weeks go by, and I don't talk to another living soul. — Sally Mann

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

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

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

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. — Sally Mann

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

Very few males have the confidence to appear vulnerable. — Sally Mann