Below you’ll find 65 of Mark’s best quotes to inspire you and help take your photography to the next level.

If you haven’t done so already, we recommend reading our Mary Ellen Mark master profile article to learn more about her photography work, techniques, cameras and much more.

Mary Ellen Mark Quotes

A great photograph needs no explanation; it functions by suggestion. There is no need to be explicit.

I think photography is closest to writing, not painting. It’s closest to writing because you are using this machine to convey an idea. The image shouldn’t need a caption; it should already convey an idea.

Life is really very sad or it’s very funny. My images are like that – sad, funny and satirical.

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 really believe in pictures that have content. That’s where my heart and soul is.

[When photographing I want to reach and touch] something that I feel is at the core of people.

I don’t think you can develop or learn a way of seeing or a point of view. A way of seeing is who you are, how you think and how you create images. It is something that is inside of you. It’s how you look at the world.

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

I always felt that you’re never as good, until the next thing you do. That you can never feel like you’ve made it, that you’re there, but I think you should always strive to be better and to stick to who you are, it’s really important you stick to who you are.

It’s not when you press the shutter, but why you press the shutter.

Documentary and Photojournalism Quotes

I’m a documentary photographer. That’s what I’ve always wanted to be; that’s where my heart and soul is.

I go into every story thinking I’m going to fail. I think about that all the time. I think it’s going to be terrible. Every story is like the first I’ve ever done.

Reality is so bizarre, you could never think of those ideas. Fiction writers are great in the sense that they can imagine. I could never ‘imagine’ things. What I’m really great at is looking – that’s my forte – to be able to pull things from reality, to see what’s strange and real.

I worry with every project that I’m going to fail, and when it starts to go well, and I sense that something beautiful and important and meaningful is being created, it’s a fantastic feeling.

I don’t expect to change the world with my photographs, I just want to make pictures that have substance.

What’s more frustrating than magazines giving less and less space is that they tell you what they want. Not LIFE, but some magazines actually want you to be an illustrator, and I don’t want to be an illustrator — I don’t enjoy those assignments. You know, I want to have a change to be a real part of the creative process and not just a technician who clicks the camera.

I belong to a bygone era when magazines sent you out to do a thorough report. It was a more traditional kind of photography reflecting a world that didn’t want images of it to be perfect. We don’t look at the truth anymore; instead, we look at whatever reassures us.

Doing long documentary projects is harder and harder because it’s not really supported in magazines as much anymore. You have to make time for personal projects. Portraiture is kind of an extension of my documentary work.

I think you have to have a real point of view that’s your own. You have to tell it your way. And, I think that it’s a mistake to shoot for a specific magazine’s point of view because it’s never going to be as good. You have to shoot for yourself and photograph [ the way] you believe it.

The best advice I can give to young documentary photographers who are starting their careers is to never lose sight of their goals and to follow their hearts.

Finding Projects and Subjects

Finding the right subject is the hardest part.

I’m just interested in people on the edges. I feel an affinity for people who haven’t had the best breaks in society. I’m always on their side. I find them more human, maybe. What I want to do more than anything is to acknowledge their existence.

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

I want my photographs not only to be real but to portray the essence of my subjects also. In order to do that, you have to be patient.

What you look for is a symbol of something in everyone’s life.

I just wanted to do photographs that I believed in without having any rhyme or reason or theory or having to spell out a sort of storytelling. I wanted to show their personalities – that was the thing that drew me to them.

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

I’m interested in reality, and I’m interested in survival. I’m interested in people who aren’t the lucky ones, who maybe have a tougher time surviving, and telling their story.

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.

I’m trying to please myself; certainly that’s a big criterion… though in a sense, I don’t take images just for myself. I take images that I think other people will want to see. I don’t take pictures to put in a box and hide them. I want as many people to see them as possible.

I think you reveal yourself by what you choose to photograph, but I prefer photographs that tell more about the subject. There’s nothing much interesting to tell about me; what’s interesting is the person I’m photographing, and that’s what I try to show.

Mary Ellen Quotes on Photographing People

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.

Everyone asks me how I get my subjects to open up to me. There’s no formula to it. It’s just a matter of who you are and how you talk to people – of being yourself. Your subjects will trust you only if you’re confident about what you’re doing. They can sense that immediately.

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.

It’s just a matter of who you are and how you talk to people. Your subjects will trust you only if you’re confident about what you’re doing. It really bothers me when photographers first approach a subject without a camera, try to establish a personal relationship, and only then get out their cameras. It’s deceptive. I think you should just show up with a camera, to make your intentions clear. People will either accept you or they won’t.

I think each photographer has a point of view and a way of looking at the world… that has to do with your subject matter and how you choose to present it. What’s interesting is letting people tell you about themselves in the picture.

The subject gives you the best idea of how to make a photograph. So I just wait for something to happen.

Portrait Photography Quotes

To touch on people’s lives [in a way they] haven’t been touched on before, it´s fascianting. You know, it’s one thing if [a celebrity] has an incredible character and you’re really going to be able to delve into their personality – that’s great. But you can never get real purity if people have been spoiled by the camera and don’t trust you. I like feeling that I’m able to be a voice for those people who aren’t famous, the people that don’t have the great opportunities.

With celebrity images they often work just because it is a famous face, and it is nothing more. I want to do more. The thing with making a celebrity image is to get beyond the celebrity.

In a portrait, you always leave part of yourself behind.

Mary Ellen Mark on Photography Technique

I don’t crop my photographs. I consider the entire frame while I’m shooting. It’s a discipline I learned when I began to photograph.

If the background doesn’t work together with your main subject, you won’t have a good picture.

Photographs can be enigmatic. They sometimes work because of what is included in the frame; and sometimes because of what is not. There’s no formula… It’s a mysterious process, an endless challenge.

Photographers must have a point of view, [they] must have something to say. Without a philosophy, a photographer is simply a technician who clicks the camera.

I don’t think you’re ever an objective observer. By making a frame you’re being selective, then you edit the pictures you want published and you’re being selective again. You develop a point of view that you want to express. You try to go into a situation with an open mind, but then you form an opinion and you express it in your photographs. It is very important for a photographer to have a point of view – that contributes to a great photograph.

I prefer not to think ahead about what I’m going to say with my photographs. I would rather be surprised and see what my subjects bring to the photograph.

People often ask me what makes a great image. That’s an almost impossible question to answer. Sometimes the obvious can make a great image. Sometimes a photograph works because of its subtlety or what is excluded from the frame. For me, a great image involves a combination of strong content and excellent design.

I tell my students, don’t look at the back of your camera, turn it off. Because you never know, you think you have it then you walk away and you’ve missed your picture. Whether you have it or not, should come from your head, not from what you see on a tiny image on the back of the camera.

A good print is really essential. I want to take strong documentary photographs that are as good technically as any of the best technical photographs, and as creative as any of the best fine-art photographs. [That is doubly important because] I don’t want to just be a photo essayist; I’m more interested in single images…. once that I feel are good enough to stand on their own.

Mary Ellen Quotes on Film Photography

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.

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.

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.

I’m kind of a purist that loves reality – and that’s not the trend now. Now they want very commercial, very decorated illustrations.

Learning how to use different formats has made me a better photographer. When I started working in medium format, it made me a better 35 mm photographer. When I started working in 4×5, it made me a better medium-format photographer.

Digital Manipulation

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.

I’ve always relied on beautiful lighting, atmosphere and who the person is, not what’s done afterwards.

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

I like the idea of being able to capture a moment in time, a moment of reality, but all that has changed now with people being able to Photoshop images so much. You don’t know what is real any more and what isn’t. But I am an analog photographer and it is about capturing the moment of reality. It hasn’t changed for me: I shoot film and I will continue to shoot film. I think it is more beautiful. It is the reason I became a photographer. I am not an illustrator; a lot of the digital, Photoshopped photography is what I would call illustration, not photography. With that kind of work the post-production guy is probably the most important guy in the process, not the photographer.

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

Black and White Photography

The difficulty with color is to go beyond the fact that it’s color – to have it be not just a colorful picture but really be a picture about something. It’s difficult. So often color gets caught up in color, and it becomes merly decorative. Some photographers use [ it ] brilliantly to make visual statements combining color and content; otherwise it is empty.

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.

The Life of a Photographer

I remember the first time I went out on the street to shoot pictures. I was in down town Philadelphia and I just took a walk and started making contact with people and photographing them, and I thought: ‘I love this. This is what I want to do forever.’ There was never another question.

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.

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

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.

When you’re working on a film [set], 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.

If you do great pictures it is fine art, no matter what. The galleries manipulate things, the market. If you deliberately set out to be an artist, that is the wrong way to think as a photographer. The work should be great, and that is all that is important. If people want it, and want it to put on their walls, that’s great too.

If you are interested in photography because you love it and are obsessed with it, you must be self-motivated, a perfectionist, and relentless.

There is only one reason I’ve stayed a photographer for so many years. Photography is always challenging.

What’s your Favorite Mary Ellen Mark Quote?

Have a favorite Mary Ellen Mark quote from the list? Let us know in the comment section below.

Don’t forget to bookmark this page, or print it out, and refer to it next time you need some inspiration. Also, don’t forget to share it with others through the usual channels (social media, forums, websites, etc).

To see more of her remarkable work, head over to the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation website.

Looking for more words of wisdom from master photographers? Check out the quotes section of Photogpedia for more great photography quotes.

More Quote Articles:

• Diane Arbus Quotes
• Henri Cartier-Bresson Quotes
• Don McCullin Quotes
• Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Quotes

The post 65 Mary Ellen Mark Quotes to Transform your Photography appeared first on Photogpedia.

Mark was fearless in her choice of subjects, photographing people on the fringes of society, or in her own words, those “that didn’t have the lucky breaks in life”. 

She sought out female mental patients in Oregon, heroin addicts in London, prostitutes in Bombay, and homeless teenagers in Seattle. Her subject choice was often people that were abused and vulnerable; some were survivors, while others were lost souls.

I’m a documentary photographer. Reality is so bizarre, you could never think of those ideas. Fiction writers are great in the sense that they can imagine. I could never ‘imagine’ things. What I’m really great at is looking – that’s my forte – to be able to pull things from reality, to see what’s strange and real.

Mary Ellen Mark

Mark was also a portraitist, took advertising commissions and led a successful parallel career as an on-set stills photographer in Hollywood. However, it was her documentary work that resonated most with the public and influenced photographers around the globe.

Related: 65 Mary Ellen Mark Quotes to Transform your Photography

In this article, we will provide an overview of Mary Ellen Mark’s work. If you want to learn more about her life and photography projects, then I recommend checking out the Mary Ellen Mark website (after you’ve read through this article).

Editor note: If you enjoy our Mary Ellen Mark profile or find it helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers through your own websites, social media and forums.

About Mary Ellen Mark

Name: Mary Ellen Mark
Nationality: American
Genre: Documentary, Photojournalism, Portraiture, Film Stills, Advertising, Street
Born: March 20, 1940 – Philadelphia 
Died: May 25, 2015 (75 years) – New York

Mary Ellen Mark Biography

Mary Ellen Mark was born in Philadelphia in 1940 to a middle-class family. She attended the University of Pennsylvania and received her undergraduate training in the fine arts, followed by a BFA in art history and painting in 1962. 

Mark began to take photography more seriously while continuing her education at the University of Pennsylvania as a graduate student, receiving an MA in photojournalism in 1964.

After she graduated, she was given a Fulbright Scholarship and went to Turkey to hone her photography skills, this was followed by extensive travel throughout Europe. 

In 1966, Mark moved to New York City, where she lived for the rest of her life, and began to work as a freelance photojournalist. 

She traveled to India, a country that has inspired some of her most significant work, for the first time in 1968.

Mark photographed throughout the United States, and in many other parts of the world, among them Mexico, England, India, Spain and Vietnam. 

Early on in her career, Mark achieved success as a stills photographer for the film industry. This lucrative career helped subsidize the cost of her social documentary projects. 

She shot production stills for dozens of films, including Alice’s Restaurant, Apocalypse Now, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Day of the Locust and Australia.

Mark’s film stills raised her profile and she was soon offered assignments from magazines, including a 1969 commission from Look to create a photo-essay on Federico Fellini, who was directing the film Fellini Satyricon, which she considered her breakthrough story in photojournalism.

Her photos have appeared in magazines Life, Time, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Paris-Match, The New York Times and The New Yorker, as well as virtually all the leading photography magazines and journals. 

Mark was a member of Magnum from 1977 to 1981. In 1988, she opened her own agency.

For over 20 years Mary Ellen Mark taught photography workshops to budding photographers in Oaxaca, Mexico. 

Mark published 18 books in her career, including Streetwise, Indian Circus and American Odyssey; and her images have been published in many anthologies and exhibition catalogs.  

She received numerous awards, including the Lifetime Achievement in Photography Award from the George Eastman House in 2014 and an Outstanding Contribution Photography Award from the World Photography Organisation. 

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

Photography Style

• Photojournalism, documentary
• Photoessay, reportage
• Social realism, subjects on fringes of society 
• Compassionate, intimate and humanistic
• Subjective and honest

Mary Ellen Mark specialized in social documentation as well as portraiture, working mainly with black and white film. 

While some of her editorial work involved portraits of celebrities, including actors, directors, writers, and musicians, more often Mark photographed those she liked to call the “unfamous,” people outside the mainstream whose lives are not conventionally newsworthy. 

I’m just interested in people on the edges. I feel an affinity for people who haven’t had the best breaks in society. I’m always on their side. I find them more human, maybe. What I want to do more than anything is to acknowledge their existence. 

Mary Ellen Mark

Documentary Photography

She was drawn particularly to subjects whose lives play out within a troubled situation, such as addiction, poverty, or illness; and those who live in groups that function like a substitute family, such as inhabitants of a brothel or performers in a touring circus. 

The variety of her topics reflected the assignments offered to her by magazines and her own personal interests. 

She typically funded her projects through a variety of means, including grants, financial support from non-profit organizations, and selling her story ideas to magazines and other commercial outlets.

Mark liked to fully immerse herself into projects over an extended period, to fully develop a relationship with her subjects.

Here are several examples: 

• Mark lived in a women’s maximum-security unit in a mental institution in Oregon for 36 days, resulting in the book Ward 81 (1979).
• She spent several months on two separate trips to India in 1980 and 1981 photographing Mother Teresa and her Missions of Charity in Calcutta for a Life magazine assignment and a subsequent book
• In 1992, Mark traveled to India and spent time with 16 different circuses during two three-month trips to produce the book Indian Circus. 

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 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

Photo-Essays and Projects

Mark would also stay in touch with her subjects long after a project is finished. 

For example, she returned to Seattle repeatedly to photograph Erin Blackwell (better known as Tiny) who was 14 when Mark first photographed her for a photo-essay for Life in 1983. 

This assignment would later lead to the Academy Award-nominated film Street-wise (1985), which was directed by Mark’s husband, the filmmaker Martin Bell, as well as Mark’s book of the same title.

Mark revealed the personalities of her subjects, and their relationship to their environment, and made no pretense to her objectivity. 

I just wanted to do photographs that I believed in without having any rhyme or reason or theory or having to spell out a sort of storytelling. I wanted to show their personalities – that was the thing that drew me to them.

Mary Ellen Mark

She always strived for each image, including those that were part of a photo-essay, to be able to stand alone as a single image, to sum up, and provide an insight into the life and personality of a particular subject. 

I think each photographer has a point of view and away of looking at the world… that has to do with your subject matter and how you choose to present it. What’s interesting is letting people tell you about themselves in the picture.

Mary Ellen Mark

What Camera Did Mary Ellen Mark Use?

Mark used a variety of different cameras and lenses to achieve her imagery, ranging from 35 mm to large-format 4×5. 

She used prime lenses and liked to work close to her subjects, preferring a wider field of view (between 24mm and 35mm). 

When working with the 35mm film format, Mark used a Leica M6 rangefinder camera, and the Canon EOS-1N with 24mm, 28mm, and 35mm lenses. On occasion, she used the Hasselblad X-Pan, with a 30mm lens. 

She quite often worked with medium format, and used Hasselblad cameras usually with a 60mm lens; and the Mamiya 7 with 43mm, 50mm and 65mm lenses. I have also seen clips of her using a Mamiya RZ Pro.

When shooting large-format film, she used a Linhof Technika 45 (4×5 view camera,) and Schneider 120mm, 135mm nd 150mm lenses. She also used the huge 250lb 20×24 Polaroid Land camera for a couple of projects. 

Each system does something different. I like to switch around.

Mary Ellen Mark

Film Photography

She never shot digital and was faithful to film photography right to the very end. 

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. 

Mary Ellen Mark

She favored black and white over color photography. That being said, she would occasionally shoot certain projects in color, including the images made for her book Prostitutes of Bombay (1981), which show prostitutes in Bombay situated in the colorfully patterned interior rooms of brothels.

When working as a stills photographer on film sets, Mark worked with Kodak Tri-X (which she rated at 200). For her color photography projects, she used Fuji HPH and Kodak PNC films.

Recommended Books

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• The Book of Everything (It’s expensive but if you’re a fan of Mary Ellen Mark’s work, this is the only book you’ll ever need.)
• On the Portrait and the Moment
• An American Odyssey 1963-1999

Recommended Videos

The Photographs of Mary Ellen Mark, CBS (2001)

Portraits & Portrayals Lecture (2013)

Helena Christensen and Mary Ellen Mark, Capture Episode (2013)

Mary Ellen Mark Photos

For more photos, head over to the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation website.

Fact Check

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Related Articles

Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment
Snapshot Profile: Diane Arbus
Quote Series: Documentary and Photojournalism Quotes

Sources

Mary Ellen Mark Obituary, The Guardian, May 2015
Vogue Tribute, Vogue, May 2015
In Memoriam: Mary Ellen Mark, Time Magazine, May 2015
Remembering Mary Ellen Mark, British Photography Journal, 2015 
Mary Ellen Mark was the photographer who saw it all, Dazed, 2020
A Life Defending Humanity, Blind Magazine, September 2020
Biography, Mary Ellen Mark Foundation website

The Masters, American Photo, January 1990
The Triumph of Photography, American Photo, January 1992
Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, 2006
An American Odyssey, Aperture, 2004
Mary Ellen Mark: On the Portrait and the Moment, Aperture, 2015 

The photographs of Mary Ellen Mark, CBS, 2001
Portraits & Portrayals Lecture, 2013
Capture Episode, 2013

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