Mary Ellen Mark

Photographer

1940-03-20

Quotes by Mary Ellen Mark

• I'm not against digital photography. It's great for newspapers. And there are photographers doing great work digitally. When they use Photoshop as a darkroom tool, that's fine, too. But at this point of my life, after so many years, I don't really want to change, and I still love film.

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

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• I'm not much for cats. I'm terrified of mice. I've worked a lot with elephants, and they are extremely intelligent and sensitive, and thankfully, they seem to like me. You never want to get on the bad side of an elephant. And never trust a chimp.

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

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• 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.

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• As a kid, I used to dream about airplanes before I ever flew in one. 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 enter other lives. I knew I wanted to be a voyeur.

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• 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.

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• I'm a street photographer, but I'm interested in any ironic, whimsical images, and there's something very romantic about a circus.

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