Top 40 Sally Mann Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Photographs open doors into the past, but they also alloq a look into the future.”

— Sally Mann

2. “I think truth is a layered phenomenon. There are many truths that accumulate and build up. I am trying to peel back and explore these rich layers of truth. All truths are difficult to reach.”

— Sally Mann

3. “Unless you photograph what you love, you’re not going to make good art.”

— Sally Mann

4. “Photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories.”

— Sally Mann

5. “There are a number of things that set Southern artists apart from anyone else. Their obsession with place and their obsession with family.”

— Sally Mann

6. “These dog bones are just making art the way art should be made, without any overarching reference. Just for fun, if you can imagine that-art for fun.”

— Sally Mann

7. “Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too.”

— Sally Mann

8. “I tend to agree with the theory that if you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it. With tiny differences creeping in at each cycle, the exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us further away.”

— Sally Mann

9. “As an artist your trajectory just has to keep going up. the thing that subverts your next body of work is the work you’ve taken before.”

— Sally Mann

10. “If it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography – the mendacity of photography – it’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it or it’s not interesting to me.”

— Sally Mann

11. “I wish I could be a better writer, but writing is so difficult. I get seduced by visual aesthetics. Because I just like making beautiful pictures, sometimes I wander away from making a clear statement.”

— Sally Mann

12. “I like to make people a little uncomfortable. It encourages them to examine who they are and why they think the way they do.”

— Sally Mann

13. “Like all photographers, I depend on serendipity I pray for what might be referred to as the angel of chance.”

— Sally Mann

14. “When the good pictures come, we hope they tell truths, but truths ‘told slant,’ just as Emily Dickinson commanded.”

— Sally Mann

15. “To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.”

— Sally Mann

16. “What is truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, its capturing a different piece of information.”

— Sally Mann

17. “It is easier for me to take ten good pictures in an airplane bathroom than in the gardens at Versailles.”

— Sally Mann

18. “One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.”

— Sally Mann

19. “How can a sentient person of the modern age mistake photography for reality? All perception is selection, and all photographs – no matter how objectively journalistic the photographer’s intent – exclude aspects of the moment’s complexity. Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time’s continuum.”

— Sally Mann

20. “I don’t see many artists who are not trying to bring their work to the public – -to the contrary I see artists nearly desperate to get attention for their art and, failing that, often for themselves.”

— Sally Mann

21. “I have nothing but respect for people who travel the world to make art and put exotic Indians in front of linen backdrops, but it’s always been my philosophy to try to make art out of the everyday and ordinary.”

— Sally Mann

22. “When I was shooting with collodion, I wasn’t just snapping a picture. I was fashioning, with fetishistic ceremony, an object whose ragged black edges gave it the appearance of having been torn from time itself.”

— Sally Mann

23. “The hardest part is setting the camera on the tripod, or making the decision to bring the camera out of the car, or just raising the camera to your face, believing, by those actions, that whatever you find before you, whatever you find there, is going to be good.”

— Sally Mann

24. “Art is seldom the result of true genius; rather, it is the product of hard work and skills learned and tenaciously practiced by regular people.”

— Sally Mann

25. “The proverbial hospitality of the South may be selectively extended but it is not a myth.”

— Sally Mann

26. “Maybe you’ve made something mediocre – there’s plenty of that in any artist’s cabinets – but something mediocre is better than nothing, and often the near-misses, as I call them, are the beckoning hands that bring you to perfection just around the blind corner.”

— Sally Mann

27. “I’m past photographing to see what things look like photographed.”

— Sally Mann

28. “To identify a person as a Southerner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative but that it is also impossibly present. Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade defiance play out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty.”

— Sally Mann

29. “You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.”

— Sally Mann

30. “The postmortem readjustment is one that many of us have had to make when our parents die. The parental door against which we have spent a lifetime pushing finally gives way, and we lurch forward, unprepared and disbelieving, into the rest of our lives.”

— Sally Mann

31. “I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory.”

— Sally Mann

32. “Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn’t diminish the volume of the flow and around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished.”

— Sally Mann

33. “All the good pictures that came so easily now make the next set of pictures virtually impossible in your mind.”

— Sally Mann

34. “I struggle with enormous discrepancies: between the reality of motherhood and the image of it, between my love for my home and the need to travel, between the varied and seductive paths of the heart. The lessons of impermanance, the occasional despair and the muse, so tenuously moored, all visit their needs upon me and I dig deeply for the spiritual utilities that restore me.”

— Sally Mann

35. “As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it, and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures telling our brief story, but what will last, beyond all of it, is the place.”

— Sally Mann

36. “My main interest was finding boyfriends. I’d park myself in the bookstore and read with one eye on everyone coming in.”

— Sally Mann

37. “Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb – an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt.”

— Sally Mann

38. “The act of looking appraisingly at a man, studying his body and asking to photograph him, is a brazen venture for a woman; for a male photographer, these acts are commonplace, even expected.”

— Sally Mann

39. “Certain moments in the creative process, moments when I am really seeing, are weirdly expansive, and I develop a hyper-attuned visual awareness, like the aura-ringed optical field before a migraine. Radiance coalesces about the landscape, rich in possibility, supercharged with something electric, insistent. Time slows down, becomes ecstatic.”

— Sally Mann

40. “Part of the artist’s job is to make the commonplace singular, to project a different interpretation onto the conventional.”

— Sally Mann

41. “If you want to keep a memory pristine, you must not call upon it too often, for each time it is revisited, you alter it irrevocably, remembering not the original impression left by experience but the last time you recalled it.”

— Sally Mann