Sally Mann Quotes
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To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about.
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When I read something, I picture that scene in that detail. That becomes very similar to composing a photo in real life.
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I baked bread, hand-ground peanuts into butter, grew and froze vegetables, and, every morning, packed lunches so healthful that they had no takers in the grand swap-fest of the lunchroom.
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Increasingly, the work I'm doing is in service to an idea rather than just to see what something looks like photographed. I'm trying to explore how I feel about something through photography.
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Writing is much, much harder than taking pictures because you have to man-haul it all out of your insides.
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I taught up in Maine a couple of times and wasn't able to take a single picture. All that blue sky! Ugh. Sparkling clear air, just terrible. I couldn't do it.
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When we were on the farm, we were isolated, not just by geography but by the primitive living conditions: no electricity, no running water and, of course, no computer, no phone.
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I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to the emotional core of me.
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I just started taking pictures, and it was - it was an instant love affair. It was just ecstatic.
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Each time you take a good picture, you have the wonderful feeling of exhilaration... and almost instantly, the flip side. You have this terrible, terrible anxiety that you've just taken your last good picture.
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When I read, I take notes and underline things. So reading is a vigorous process for me, but I read in bed. My poor husband is trying to go to sleep, and I'm reaching over him to get the Post-it notes.
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The whole nature of photography has changed with the advent of a camera in everybody's hand.
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I was just taking pictures to see what they looked like. Just for the fun of it. It wasn't about anything in some cases. Some of them were just about the joy of opening up an aperture and seeing what shows up.
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If I take enough pictures, I'm going to get a good one, and I know not to stop at a bad one.
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I don't like memoirs. I think they're self-serving, and people use them to settle scores, and I really tried not to do that. You have to have a really interesting life to justify memoir, and my life has been pretty ho-hum.
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I'm the weird person who completely loved and devoured 'Middlemarch' but who has not finished far shorter and more readable books due to distraction or the fact that by some miracle I am sleeping through the night.
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I have had a fascination with death, I think, that might be considered genetic for a long time. My father had the same affliction, I guess.
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Death makes us sad, but it can also make us feel more alive.
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Maintaining the dignity of my subjects has grown to be, over the years, an imperative in my work, both in the taking of the pictures and in their presentation.
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I'd park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in. I remember reading a Robert Bly book of poetry.
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I chose photography over writing. I had to make a living.
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I think the media is a fear-mongering operation. They love to rile their viewership up or to scare them.
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Time, memory, loss and love are my main artistic concerns, but time, among all of them, becomes the determinant.
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I remember when the family album came out, people would just knock on our door because they thought they knew us, and that, of course, is one of the great hazards.