Mary Ellen Mark

“I work in colour sometimes, but I guess the images I most connect to, historically speaking, are in black and white. I see more in black and white - I like the abstraction of it.”

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

“What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you've seen or thought about.”

“If I'm in an unusual or extreme social environment, I always want to know what it's like to grow up there and experience it as normal, everyday life. And I want to know what sort of adults these children are going to turn into.”

“I saw that my camera gave me a sense of connection with others that I never had before. It allowed me to enter lives, satisfying a curiosity that was always there but that was never explored before.”

“I love to photograph people in their own environment. It offers clues to what's important in their lives.”

“I don't relax. I can't take vacations. I'm obsessive-compulsive, and I worry with every project that I'm going to fail. When it starts to go well, and I sense that something beautiful and important and meaningful is being created, it's a fantastic feeling, and I find it very hard to stop.”

“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.”

“I realized all of the possibilities that could exist for me with my camera: all of the images that I could capture, all of the lives I could enter, all of the people I could meet and how much I could learn from them.”

“I'm most interested in finding the strangeness and irony in reality. That's my forte.”

“I knew from the first moment I picked up a camera, on my first school assignment, what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was going to find a way to travel the world and tell the stories of the people I met through photographs.”

“Every photograph is the photographer's opinion about something. It's how they feel about something: what they think is horrible, tragic, funny.”

“Sometimes I work on film sets. I've done this for 40 years. I always wanted to photograph on the set of an Ingmar Bergman film. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity.”

“I respect newspapers, but the reality is that magazine 'photojournalism' is finished. They want illustrations, Photoshopped pictures of movie stars.”

“I think the prom is very serious also. It's an American ritual, it's a rite of passage, and it's very much a part of this country.”

“I don't see how a woman in documentary photography could have children. I think it's a very difficult thing to do to raise a family, and I have enormous respect for people who do it. I'd hate to do something like that and not be good at it.”

“Nowadays shots are created in post-production, on computers. It's not really photography.”

“I have an incredible relationship with dogs. I'm kind of a dog-whisperer.”

“Reality is always extraordinary.”

“I really knew when I started photographing I wanted it to be a way of knowing different cultures, not just in other countries but in this country, too, and I knew I wanted to be a voyeur.”