Mary Ellen Mark Quotes

There are an awful lot of people in the world and it's going to be terribly hard to photograph all of them... It was my teacher Lisette Model who finally made it clear to me that the more specific you are, the more general it will be.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

The desire to discover, the desire to move, to capture the flavor, three concepts that describe the art of photography.

Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already.

I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I'm photographing.

I'm not a politician or a scholar or political historian. I'm just a photographer who's trying to capture a spirit. It's not an intellectual process; it's an intuitive process.

I've been a big fan always of getting my camera in different places and trying to seek the unusual vantage point.

I admired the work of photographers like Beaton, Penn, and Avedon as much as I respected the grittier photographers such as Robert Frank. But in the same way that I had to find my own way of reportage, I had to find my own form of glamour.

It doesn't matter if you use a box camera or you use a Leica; the important thing is what motivates you when you are photographing.

I like Ryan McGinley's work.

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

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure.

Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.

This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.

Whatever it takes to get the image to reach that level is what that photographer needs to do.

I love photography and I love the art of photography. So when I'm working with high-level art photographers, I give them artistic freedom because I want that for myself when it's my turn to do my work and I never try and control it or say I'll only do this or I want it like that.

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

...all along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.

I have asked students at the beginning of their careers, what things of that sort might haunt them – what things they must photograph, things they have to try to shoot even before they master the intricacies of making dye transfer prints.

I love photography and art-directing is something that I really would enjoy to do.

I want my photographs not only to be real but to portray the essence of my subjects also. In order to do that, you have to be patient.

The photographer's art is a continuous discovery which requires patience and time.

I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

I love painting. As far as photography is concerned, I understand nothing.