Sally Mann Quotes

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

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

The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I’m past photographing to see what things look like photographed.

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

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

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.

Death makes us sad, but it can also make us feel more alive.

I have a vivid, apocalyptic imagination.

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