Mary ellen mark

Reality is always extraordinary.

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

I was fascinated by my own prom pictures.

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...

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.

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

I'm just interested in what makes a photograph.

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.

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