Sally Mann

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

“I guess I have a certain willingness for audacity.”

“I have three libraries. As a gift, a friend alphabetized and organized my main library of novels, history books, and nonfiction. Then I have a photo-book collection. Then there's this nearly whole room of my childhood books. I've also got cookbooks and a big collection of horse-related books.”

“Very few males have the confidence to appear vulnerable.”

“I had written my master's thesis on Ezra Pound on 'The Cantos.' And don't ask me about it. I don't remember anything about it.”

“Time, memory, loss and love are my main artistic concerns, but time, among all of them, becomes the determinant.”

“I couldn't be Susan Sontag. I'm not very good with abstract thought. I always just take to the emotional core of me.”

“Though I made my share of mistakes, as all parents do, I was devoted to my kids. I walked them to school every morning and walked back to pick them up at 3.”

“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.”

“The whole nature of photography has changed with the advent of a camera in everybody's hand.”

“I'm going out on a limb here and say that I believe my morality should have no bearing on the discussion of the pictures I made. ... Oscar Wilde, when attacked in a similar ad hominem way, insisted that it is senseless to speak of morality when discussing art, asserting that the hypocritical, prudish, and philistine English public, when unable to find the art in a work of art, instead looked for the main in it.”

“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.”

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

“Weeks go by, and I don't talk to another living soul.”

“If I take enough pictures, I'm going to get a good one, and I know not to stop at a bad one.”

“Eventually, my highbrow parents, who so hated the Eisenhower suburban culture of the 1950s that the only magazines they subscribed to were 'The Atlantic' and 'The New Yorker,' broke down and got 'Life' magazine.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Don't get between me and a really good picture in the darkroom, because then I want to go straight to the darkroom and develop it. But once that's done, I'm fine.”

“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.”