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

Mary Ellen Mark

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

Mary Ellen Mark

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

Mary Ellen Mark

Different Cultures

" 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. "

Mary Ellen Mark

" I was fascinated by my own prom pictures. "

Mary Ellen Mark

" 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. "

Mary Ellen Mark

" I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn. "

Mary Ellen Mark

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

Mary Ellen Mark

" It's good that everyone has an opportunity to take pictures, the chance to be a photographer. Some are good, too. But the bad thing is that it's very, very difficult to take a great picture. Everyone can take a good picture - even a child - but it's hard to make a great one. "

Mary Ellen Mark

" Reality is always extraordinary. "

Mary Ellen Mark

" I've always been fascinated by twins. In my forty years of photographing, whenever there was an opportunity, I would take a picture of twins. I found the notion that two people could appear to look exactly alike very compelling. "

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. "

Mary Ellen Mark

Black And White

" 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

" During prom season, I travel around the country with a 20-by-24 camera - which is logistically complicated - and photograph proms. My husband made a film of it. "

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

" When you're working on a film, it's almost like photographing paintings at a museum. You're photographing somebody else's world. I just try and interpret it and make it real, and make it what the actors are about, what the director is about, and what the film is about. "

Mary Ellen Mark

" I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul. "

Mary Ellen Mark

" If I hadn't become a photographer, I would have loved to become a doctor. I would have loved to have done something that actually helped people and changed their lives. "

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

" 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

" 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

" One of my all-time favorite photographers is Irving Penn. I wish I could have watched him work. "

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