Mary Ellen Mark Quotes

My dad had been an ardent amateur photographer, and he taught me to compose a photograph from the back to the front, and then populate the picture.

In everything I do, the aesthetics are driven by the emotion. However I can do that with a camera, whether it's a long lens or a wide lens, I'll do.

A photographer must choose a palette as painters choose theirs.

Videos are more like photography. It's not as much about trying to tell a story as it is creating images.

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

Look at lots of exhibitions and books, and don't get hung up on cameras and technical things. Photography is about images.

I became interested in photography when I found my own sketching was inadequate.

When taking a photo, I tend to look for one of the following: depth, symmetry, color or contrast. All of those things catch my eye to the point where I stop dead in my tracks to capture whatever it is that I've seen.

In the world of photography, you get to share a captured moment with other people.

I love a well composed shot. It doesn't necessarily have to be beautiful, but it must be well composed.

I'm aware of other artists, but what I'm really most interested in is viewing individual pictures. I like dramatic pictures.

A photograph can look anyway. It just depends basically on what you photograph.

I always think, 'What does this picture mean? What's the best place to put my camera? Do I have anything extra in the picture, things in the background that will distract? Am I in the basic position that will give the essential things for this picture but not too much?'

A good photograph is knowing where to stand.

Cinematography is infinite in its possibilities... much more so than music or language.

The landscape is like being there with a powerful personality and I'm searching for just the right angles to make that portrait come across as meaningfully as possible.

In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color.

If your pictures are not good enough, it’s because you are not close enough.

Photography is about finding things. And painting is different - it's about making something.

I love photography myself.

I enjoy photography. It's a lot of fun. It keeps me on my P's and Q's and, when you think about it, most people think photography is just going to a game. But you start to think, dang, that would be a good picture. Or you're driving along and see something and think, 'that would be nice.'

I have a low-tech camera with one lens that I've shot everything in my life on. My subjects and my subject matter sometimes really are powerful, and so my job is to get it into focus.

[Photography] remains servile to a thoughtless vision of the world... As the term snapshot suggests, photography seizes the moment and exhibits it.

The artist is always concerned with a total view of the world. However, when the photographer takes a picture ... the edge of his picture is just as interesting as the middle, one can only guess at the existence of a whole, and the view presented seems chosen by chance.

...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.