A Quote by Mary Ellen Mark

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

Quote Topics

About Basic Cross Cultural Emotions Experience Feelings Lines Make Photographs Trying Understood Universally Want

Quote Author

Mary Ellen Mark
American - Photographer
March 20, 1940 - May 25, 2015

Teaching is only interesting because you struggle with trying to talk about photographs, photographs that work, you see.

Garry Winogrand

All photographs are about light. The great majority of photographs record light as a way of describing objects in space. A few photographs are less about objects and more about the space that contains them. Still fewer photographs are about light itself.

John Paul Caponigro

Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

Susan Sontag

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

Susan Sontag

I've had photographs taken for portraits because I very much prefer working from the photographs than from models... I couldn't attempt to do a portrait from photographs of somebody I didn't know.

Francis Bacon

I don't consider [my] photographs fashion photographs. The photographs were for fashion, but at the same time they had an ulterior motive, something more to do with the world in general.

Deborah Turbeville

I make photographs and still make photographs of the natural environment. It's a love because that was part of my life before I was involved in photography.

John Sexton

A good print is really essential. I want to take strong documentary photographs that are as good technically as any of the best technical photographs, and as creative as any of the best fine-art photographs. [...] I don't want to just be a photo essayist; I'm more interested in single images...ones that I feel are good enough to stand on their own.

Mary Ellen Mark

We know that photographs inform people. We also know that photographs move people. The photograph that does both is the one we want to see and make.

Sam Abell

Every year, the memories I have of my father become more faint, unclear, and distant. once they were vivid and true, then they became like photographs, and now they are more like photographs of photographs.

Nicole Krauss

I believe in the resonance and staying power of quiet photographs. These photographs required a certain seeing, but few special techniques, and no tricks. Something though was hard. It was hard being between photographs and not knowing when or how another image would reveal itself.

William Albert Allard

When I am preparing my 'lookalike' photographs, I think about the character of the real people, because, if the photographs are going to be plausible, you have to convince the viewer that they could have happened.

Alison Jackson

My work is about making candy for the eyes. It's about grabbing your attention. Even though my work is appearing in magazines I am trying to make a large picture. I want my photographs to read like a poster.

David LaChapelle

Saudi Arabia is so conservative. At first there were photographs of women I took that I couldn't publish - of women without their abayas. So I started writing out little anecdotes about things I couldn't photograph and wove it in with a more obscure picture and called it "moments that got away". I realised these worked as well as the photographs by themselves. There are a lot of photographers who feel the story is all in the photographs but I really believe in weaving in complementary words with the pictures.

Olivia Arthur

Whenever I am tired of making photographs of drawings, I make drawings of photographs.

Vik Muniz

A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs-especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past-are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance.

Susan Sontag

A Quote by Mary Ellen Mark

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors