Sally Mann Quotes

Author Image

Sally Mann

Profession : Photographer

Birth : May 1, 1951

I have no animus toward digital, though I still pretty much take everything on a silver-based negative, either a wet plate or just regular silver 8x10. But I've started messing a little bit with scanning the negative and then reworking it just slightly.

Sally Mann

Death makes us sad, but it can also make us feel more alive.

Sally Mann

It didn't help my career to be living in Appalachia.

Sally Mann

I don't know what the instinct is, to save every report card, every half-sentence scribbled note, but my mother did it pretty effectively, and I've done it to a fare-thee-well.

Sally Mann

I try and take the commonplace - and some of it is writ large, like death - take the commonplace and make it universally resonant, revelatory, and beautiful at the same time.

Sally Mann

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.

Sally Mann

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.

Sally Mann

I'm not an ardent feminist - well, maybe I am an ardent feminist. I just roll my eyes at the way women are constantly used and how sensitive men are about photographs of themselves.

Sally Mann

Writing is much, much harder than taking pictures because you have to man-haul it all out of your insides.

Sally Mann

Matte digital prints are gorgeous, don't you agree? But the glossy digital prints, I just can't stand that paper.

Sally Mann

I'm not a good photographer, not a good writer. I'm a pretty regular person whose insecurity is so pervasive that it makes me always feel vulnerable.

Sally Mann

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.

Sally Mann

The thing that makes writing so difficult is you don't have the element of serendipity. At least with a photograph, you can set up the camera, and something might happen. You might be a lousy photographer, but you can get a good picture if you just take enough of them.

Sally Mann