Mary Ellen Mark Quotes

United States, Photographer
March 20, 1940 – May, 25, 2015.

Mary Ellen Mark was an American photographer known for her photojournalism/documentary photography, portraiture, and advertising photography. She photographed people who were "away from mainstream society and toward its more interesting, often troubled fringes".

Reality is always extraordinary.

Mary Ellen Mark
- Reality
It's good that everyone has an opportunity to take pictures, the chance to be a photographer. Some are good, too. But the bad thing is that it's very, very difficult to take a great picture. Everyone can take a good picture - even a child - but it's hard to make a great one.

Mary Ellen Mark
- Good
- Great
- Bad

Usually my ideas for work have revolved around my interest in people, especially people that live on the edges of society.

Mary Ellen Mark
- People
- Work
- Live
I have an incredible relationship with dogs. I'm kind of a dog-whisperer.

Mary Ellen Mark
- Relationship
- Dog
I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn.

Mary Ellen Mark
- Great
What I'm trying to do is make photographs that are universally understood... that cross cultural lines. I want my photographs to be about the basic emotions and feelings that we all experience.

Mary Ellen Mark
- Trying
- Experience
In 1965, I was in Trabzon in eastern Turkey on a Fulbright scholarship. I would get up every morning and walk around the streets and look for photographs.

Mary Ellen Mark
- Up
- Morning
Nowadays shots are created in post-production, on computers. It's not really photography.

Mary Ellen Mark
- Photography

In every successful still photographic project that I have completed, there has always been a turning point in the story where I felt that perhaps I was working on something that could be very special.

Mary Ellen Mark