Mary Ellen Mark Quotes

I shot images of everything I could find over the course of a year. I would go all over the world and take pictures. In a day, I could easily take thousands.

The pictures I take are not regular selfies. I give people a sneak peek into culture and lifestyles and experiences from around the world.

I enjoy traveling and recording far-away places and people with my camera. But I also find it wonderfully rewarding to see what I can discover outside my own window. You only need to study the scene with the eyes of a photographer.

I love photography, I love food, and I love traveling, and to put those three things together would just be the ultimate dream.

The most interesting thing was looking out the window and taking photographs of different places on Earth.

I think a lot of times, especially for certain stories, photographers travel together for safety reasons, and they also invariably cross paths. But you could have 10 photographers shooting together in the same spot but capturing different images.

I became obsessed with the storytelling of photography and going on little adventures.

I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.

Some time ago, we went to Asia and took a camera along, and I began to do what I'd done even years ago doing people. I couldn't get interested in it. And I did hundreds of photographs of details of the monuments as sculpture.

I remember the first time I went out on the street to shoot pictures. I was in downtown Philadelphia, and I just took a walk and started making contact with people and photographing them, and I thought, 'I love this. This is what I want to do forever.' There was never another question.

The most powerful weapon in the world, as far as I'm concerned, is the camera.

At one point, I wanted to be a wildlife photographer. I also love to travel, so maybe I'd do travel writing.

When I'm on an adventure, I live with a camera in my hand, and that's what I try to give to the readers inside the space that gives us every chapter of the story.

I always liked taking photographs.

Photography is an adventure just as life is an adventure.

When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

The camera gave me an incredible freedom. It gave me the ability to parade through the world and look at people and things very, very closely.

I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.

You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.

Everyone started to have a camera. That's when I started to travel outside of New York and go into nature.

You can go into all sorts of situations with a camera and people will think they should serve it.

Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times...I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.

It was not until I was in my forties, in the fifth decade of my life, that the sense of place, the spirit of place, became of paramount importance to me. It was then that I began my travels, that I discovered, through photography, the quality of light, and that I gradually became able to paint the mood of place.

I travel, I read, I write, I have other lives. But when I have a camera, I know that's my country, my island.

Obviously I am a photographer and I believe in my medium: I do think that powerful photographs can force change. It doesn't take long to look and be engaged in a strong image whereas, with a story, you have to actually sit down and pause and be involved in it.