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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Mary Ellen Mark Quotes

Reality is always extraordinary.

– Mary Ellen Mark

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.

– Mary Ellen Mark

I wanted to travel from the beginning. As a kid, I used to dream about airplanes, before I ever flew in one.

– 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.

– Mary Ellen Mark

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.

– 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

In 1965, I was in Trabzon in eastern Turkey on a Fulbright scholarship. I would get up every morning and walk around the streets and look for photographs.

– Mary Ellen Mark

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.

– Mary Ellen Mark

Photograph the world as it is. Nothing’s more interesting than reality.

– Mary Ellen Mark

There are some people who become best friends with everyone they photograph. There are people that I really like and admire and respect, but in a way I think it’s better to keep a distance. I think you get better pictures of people that you don’t know very well.

– Mary Ellen Mark

I would die if I had to be confined. I don’t want to feel that I’m missing out on experiencing as much as I can. For me, experiencing is knowing people all over the world and being able to photograph.

– Mary Ellen Mark

A lot of people who don’t have anything collect dogs; it’s kind of a symbol of having something.

– Mary Ellen Mark

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.

– Mary Ellen Mark

I’ve always been interested in photographing traditions and customs – especially in America. The prom is an American tradition, a rite of passage that has always been one of the most important rituals of American youth. It is a day in our lives that we never forget – a day full of hopes and dreams for our future.

– Mary Ellen Mark

I was thinking about how fleeting and precious life is. Life is also arbitrary. For example, the choices that you make, the luck of being born into the right bed, to parents who support and help you and who love you. That doesn’t always happen – and then, what happens when it doesn’t?

– Mary Ellen Mark

I love dogs. I absolutely adore them. When I’m teaching in Mexico, I rescue dogs from the streets and make my students adopt them.

– Mary Ellen Mark

I was something of a problem kid. I was emotional, wild, rebellious at school. I’m very touched by kids who don’t have advantages; they are much more interesting than kids who have everything. They have a lot of passion and emotion, such a strong will.

– Mary Ellen Mark

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

– Mary Ellen Mark

The obsessions we have are pretty much the same our whole lives. Mine are people, the human condition, life.

– Mary Ellen Mark

Looking at my own prom photograph reminds me of how significant that moment was – and how fleeting life is.

– Mary Ellen Mark

I’m staying with film, and with silver prints, and no Photoshop. That’s the way I learned photography: You make your picture in the camera. Now, so much is made in the computer… I’m not anti-digital; I just think, for me, film works better.

– Mary Ellen Mark

When I started out, it was considered very wrong to change an image. There were scandals if someone inserted a sky into a war picture or something. Now it’s all about that.

– Mary Ellen Mark

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