Sally Mann
[Photographer, b. 1951, Lexington, Virginia, lives in Lexington.]

 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. 
 If transgression is at the very heart of photographic portraiture, then the ideal outcome—beauty, communion, honesty, empathy—mitigates the offense. 
 Sometimes I think the only memories I have are those that I’ve created around photographs of me as a child. Maybe I’m creating my own life. I distrust any memories I do have. They may be fictions, too. 
 ... if it doesn’t have ambiguity, don’t bother to take it. I love that, that aspect of photography—the mendacity of photography—it’s got to have some kind of peculiarity in it or it’s not interesting to me. 
 Good photographs are gifts… Taken for granted they don’t come. I set the camera up and… suspend myself in that familiar space about a foot above the ground where good photographs come. 
 Sometimes, when I get a good picture, it feels like I have taken another nervous step into increasingly rarified air. Each good-news picture, no matter how hard-earned, allows me only a crumbling foothold on this steepening climb—an ascent whose milestones are fear and doubt. 
 Photographs open doors into the past, but they also allow a look into the future. 
 To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. And I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice. 
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