Mary Ellen Mark Quotes

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.

The camera has always been a magic wand for me, giving me access to places where I could try new experiments.

When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I'd like to know them. Anyone I know I photograph.

Writing isn't necessarily about what one knows but what one wants to know.

In every photographer there is something of a stroller.

I found that the camera was a comforting companion. It opened up new worlds, and gave me access to people's most intimate moments. I discovered the privilege of seeing life in all its complexity, the thrill of learning something new every day. When I was behind a camera, it was the only place in the world I wanted to be.

None. They should just go out and photograph and stop talking about it. That's the only way they are going to find themselves. They can't do it in their heads - they have to go out and do it in the camera and get it on film.

Searching is everything - going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you.

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.

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.

Words build bridges into unexplored regions.

I think writing is really about a journey of understanding. So you take something that seems very far away, and the more you write about it, the more you travel into it, and you see it from within.

This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.

I don't do a lot of research, exactly, but I'm constantly wandering through the world finding things incredible and remembering them.

As I grew up I was fervently desirous of becoming acquainted with Nature.

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

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

I opened up every can of worms I could. I got to the place where I would peel back one layer, and then another layer, and the stuff that would come up underneath was so inspiring, it made me want to write about it.

Taking time to sit back and watch and think about what you've seen is important. Traveling did a great deal to me. I found that when I travel and just sit in the corner and watch, a million ideas come to me.

A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.

As long as the world continues to be strange and interesting, I still want to take pictures of it.

I'm more interested in what I discover than what I invent.

I enjoy looking beyond the obvious and look at the stories happening all around me - you kind of formulate things in your mind and get excited about them.

If with open mind one reads and observes industriously and long; if in so doing one covers a wide field and so covering reflects in terms of realism, he is likely, soon or late, to be brought to a sudden consciousness that Man is an unknown quantity and his existence unsuspected.