My Fascination with Sally Mann

The moment I saw my first Sally Mann photograph, which was sadly only yesterday, I was immediately drawn into the world portrayed on my classroom's white board.  Eagerly, I ran home and fired up the computer wanting and needing to see more.  As the images appeared before me on the computer screen, I was overwhelmed with what I saw.  Each one more intriguing than the last, images of times long past and a simpler, slower way of life, reminding me of home. Each one drawing me into it's world, invoking thought and emotion. 

Sally Mann Candy Cigarette 1989

The more I looked at her work, the more intrigued I was with her.  What is in her head, what is she like, who is she and how does she do it?  I was surprised to learn that none of the images I was falling in love with were from the time I envisioned.  While I was busy growing up, going to college, being immersed in Biology and Chemistry, being a mom, a wife and a friend, Sally Mann was creating.  Not a single of her hauntingly beautiful images were created before my birth.  How did I miss one of the most controversial and talented photographers of today? I made up for lost time, I read and watched all I could find about her for the next twenty-four hours, totally immersed and fascinated by this woman and her work, breathing it all in, allowing it to shape and change me forever.

Sally Mann, like myself, is a Southern girl to her very core. This is truly evident in her work. Her father gave her an old 5x7 antique view camera and many of the antique view cameras she uses today.  All of which are near or more than a hundred years old.  She uses a wet-plate or collodian  technique that dates back to 1851.  Glass plates are covered with collodian, inserted into the camera and exposed while still wet.  This is the same process used by Civil War era photographers to capture the images we see in our history books today. By her own admission, she is not an expert at this technique and credits her imperfections for the perfection of her work.

From the PBS series "Art in the 21st Century" 2003

  "Mistakes I make anyway, turn out to be good things in the end...I'm so worried that I'm going to perfect this technique one day... It's unfortunate how many of my pictures do depend on some technical error. It's not something I do to the negatives, but on the other hand it's not a negative I toss in the trash bin either.  I've taken some pictures in the past that were miraculously transformed by some hand other than my own and made a better image and I really welcome those interventions. Some photographers pray for the angel of certainty in their work. I'm sort of praying for the angel of uncertainty to visit my plate."  Sally Mann "What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann" 2005
     
Sally Mann finds beauty in the things she encounters in her day to day life.  She admires the photographer who travels the world to create art and capture moments, but admits it never crossed her mind to leave home to do so.  The majority of her work has been created on her farm in Lexington, Virginia with later works created in Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennessee. "It's always been my philosophy to try and make art out of the everyday and ordinary.  The things that are close to you are the things that you can photograph the best and unless you photograph what you love, you are not gonna make good art."

Sally Mann 1998 featured in Deep South 2005

Sally Mann Gorjus 1989 featured in Immediate Family 1992

Sally has a vast collection of work including nine current books in print and is the subject of two films entitled "Blood Ties" (1995) and "What Remains" (2005).  She first gained national notoriety in the early nineties with her third collection entitled "Immediate Family" when she gained the unwanted attention of the right-winged Moral Majority and the outrage of people across the country. Mann considered the collection “natural through the eyes of a mother, since I have seen my children in every state: happy, sad, playful, sick, bloodied, angry and even naked.” This body of work has been widely scrutinized by many, but critics agreed with Mann.  Chris Hagen said in a New York Times article dated June 5, 1992 that her “vision in large measure [is] accurate, and a welcome corrective to familiar notions of youth as a time of unalloyed sweetness and innocence,” and in November, 2000 Lyle Rexer also wrote in his New York Times article that her book "created a place that looked like Eden, then cast upon it the subdued and shifting light of nostalgia, sexuality and death.".  In 2001, Time Magazine named Sally Mann "America's Best Photographer" and said of her work "Mann recorded a combination of spontaneous and carefully arranged moments of childhood repose and revealingly — sometimes unnervingly — imaginative play. What the outraged critics of her child nudes failed to grant was the patent devotion involved throughout the project and the delighted complicity of her son and daughters in so many of the solemn or playful events. No other collection of family photographs is remotely like it, in both its naked candor and the fervor of its maternal curiosity and care."

Sally Mann What Remains 2003

On December 8, 2000 an escaped fugitive was injured by police and then committed suicide on the Mann family farm in Lexington, Virginia.  Mann said " When it was all done there was all this yellow tape around the trees. So, I walked up there and I looked around and there was this little pool of blood and it was strangely dark, almost like chocolate...it actually sank down into the earth in an incremental way.  It was very surprising and I sort of pulled back and watched the earth take a little sip of his blood.  For awhile I kept the area cleared where he died and I took some pictures of it and it opened up a whole new project for me.  The convict's death had a radical impact on the way I thought about the land.  I began asking myself the question of what happens to a landscape when there are massive numbers of deaths that occur there?"  After this event Mann began photographing Civil War battlefields, mainly Antietam, but she also photographed others.  Her farm is within 2 hours of one third of the battlefields from the Civil War. Her 2003 book entitled "What Remains" chronicles this work along with the remains of her beloved greyhound, Eva and her work at the Forensic Anthropology Center (the Body Farm) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The book ends with a close-up study of her children's faces to convey a feeling of hope and love.

Sally Mann What Remains 2003

Sally Mann 2001 featured in What Remains 2003

"The earth doesn't care where death occurs, it's job is to efface and renew itself.  It's the artist who by coming in and writing about it or painting it or taking a photograph of it makes that earth powerful and creates death's memory because the land isn't going to remember itself, but the artist will." Sally Mann

In my opinion, Sally Mann is by far one of the most important photographers of today. She incorporates her uniqueness and individuality in all of her photographs, successfully finding beauty in the everyday, the ordinary and even the things most find disturbing. The three books highlighted here are only a small sliver of the entirety of her photography.  To me, they most exemplify the shaping of who she is as a photographer and the intent of her work.  In addition to these, there are also amazingly profound and beautiful images in all of her collections including but not limited to "At Twelve" (1988), "Still Time" (1994), "Proud Flesh" (2009) a 6 year chronicle of the effects of Muscular Dystrophy on her husband Larry and "The Flesh and The Spirit" (2010).  Currently, she is working on a collection about the legacy of slavery in Virginia and "Marital Trust" which is a collection of images chronicling her life with her husband  Larry Mann and spans a period of more than thirty years.  

Sally Mann 1998 featured in Deep South 2005

Sally Mann is featured in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Japan, the  National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, the Taubman Museum of Arts, Cleveland Museum of Art, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden and the Whitney Museum in New York City.

Related Links:
sallymann.com
Art in the 21st Century
Giving Up the Ghost
The Photographer: Sally Mann