Sally Mann Quotes

If youre not interested in life, then photography has no meaning

When the woman is attractive, is it an interesting picture, or is it the woman? I had a lot of headaches with that, which was why it was interesting. I don't think I always got it straight.

Actually, documentary pictures include every subject in the world - good, bad, indifferent. I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.

Photographers feel guilty that all they do for a living is press a button.

Every photograph is a battle of form versus content.

I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

My favourite stuff is visual, and I always want to work with visual artwork. I think it depends on the person, but for me, photographs of an image of something interesting or inspiring is worth a lot more than words to me. I think every concept I've come up with and turned into films or that will be hopefully become a film comes from images first.

If you are not passionately devoted to an idea, you can make very pleasant pictures but they won't make you cry.

Far more interesting than problem solving is problem creation.

I've always cared more about taking pictures than about the art market.

And what we called photojournalism, the photos seen in places like Life magazine, didn't interest me either. They were just not good-there was no art there. The first person who I respected immensely was Henri Cartier-Bresson. I still do.

What we must demand from the photographer is the ability to put such a caption beneath his picture as will rescue it from the ravages of modishness and confer upon it a revolutionary use value.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects.

What the human eye observes casually and incuriously, the eye of the camera (the lens) notes with relentless fidelity.

You're in the middle of making a movie and this part of the process is always very interesting. Because you think what you're making your movie is and then you start putting it out there, and then people tell you what your movie is.

For me, the best part is people who watch the movie and tell me it inspired them to collaborate with their friend who's a photographer or filmmaker.

This then: to photograph a rock, have it look like a rock, but be more than a rock.

I tell a lot of interesting stories and talk about my background and have a lot of fun. We have a lot of pictures. They actually came to my house and shot me painting my toenails and doing dishes. But I never really do the dishes.

A picture, to be an interesting picture, must be more than a picture, otherwise it is only a reproduction of an object, and not an object of value in itself.

Color is descriptive. Black and white is interpretive.

Los Angeles has interested me for a long time. I was in Texas for five years, for the same reason. I wanted to photograph there.

Most photographers seem to operate with a pane of glass between themselves and their subjects. They just can't get inside and know the subject.

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.

I think I’ve said this before many times—that photography allows you to learn to look and see. You begin to see things you had never paid any attention to. And as you photograph, one of the benefits is that the world becomes a much richer, juicier, visual place. Sometimes it is almost unbearable — it is too interesting. And it isn’t always just the photos you take that matters. It is looking at the world and seeing things that you never photograph that could be photographs if you had the energy to keep taking pictures every second of your life.