"I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do."
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Quote collection
Sally Mann quotes (page 1 of 2)
39 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"Photographs open doors into the past, but they also alloq a look into the future"
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"The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Unless you photograph what you love, you're not going to make good art."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories."
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"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."
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"It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles."
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"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."
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"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."
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"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."
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