Sally Mann Quotes

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today.

... not only is life put in new patterns from the air, but it is somehow arrested, frozen into form. (The leaping hare is caught in a marble panel.) A glaze is put over life. There is no flaw, no crack in the surface; a still reservoir, no ripple on its face. Looking down from the air that morning, I felt that stillness rested like a light over the earth. The waterfalls seemed frozen solid; the tops of the trees were still; the river hardly stirred, a serpent gently moving under its shimmering skin.

Art is the child of Nature.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

If there is any reason to single out artists as being more necessary to our lives than any others, it is because they provide us with light that cannot be extinguished. They go into dark rooms and poke at their souls until the contours of our own are familiar to us.

The universe of poetry is the universe of emotional truth. Our material is in the way we feel and the way we remember.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once, life would collapse. There are simply no definitive answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.

In the films I've done recently, I've been learning a little more about the side of myself that enjoys being a light. I remember when I used to dress in all black and you'd say. "Just be pretty, hold your head up, be proud. Be a pleasant person and don't cover yourself so much with darkness, your need to be a little crazy." Now I have nothing against anything I've been in before, because I love all sides of me, but I have been experimenting more with that lovely woman side. In this age of feminism, I would hate for the whole gentlemen and ladies things to be lost.

The secret to dancing is that it is about everything except dancing.

Expression is not a matter of passion mirrored on the human face or revealed by a violent gesture. When I paint a picture, its every detail is expressive.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

Intellectuals say simple things in difficult ways. Artists say difficult things in simple ways.

It's a man's sincerity and depth of vision that makes him a poet.

The storyteller makes no choice, soon you will not hear his voice, his job is to shed light, and not to master

Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.

Image quality is not the product of a machine, but of the person who directs the machine, and there are no limits to imagination and expression.

I felt the naivete of a child in my dancing. I cherished that feeling. I had what I call a knowledgeable naivete, and it worked for me.

Don't regret your life, child, it will pass soon enough.

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.

I've always said that the only thing a photograph is good at capturing faithfully is another flat surface.

I don't express myself in my paintings. I express my not-self.

Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water.