Sally Mann, presentation 3

Sally Mann was born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia, where she continues to live and work. She received a BA from Hollins College in 1974, and an MA in writing from the same school in 1975. Her early series of photographs of her three children and husband resulted in a series called “Immediate Family.” In her recent series of landscapes of Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, and Georgia, Mann has stated that she “wanted to go right into the heart of the deep dark South.” Using damaged lenses and a camera that requires the artist to use her hand as a shutter, these photographs are marked by the scratches, light leaks, and shifts in focus that were part of the photographic process as it developed during the 19th century. Mann has won numerous awards, including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Her books of photographs include “Immediate Family,” “At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women;” and “Mother Land: Recent Landscapes of Georgia and Virginia.” Her photographs are in the permanent collections of many museums, including The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Sally Mann’s Aesthetic

“If I could be said to have any kind of aesthetic, it’s sort of a magpie aesthetic—I just go and I pick up whatever is around. If you think about it, the children were there, so I took pictures of my children. It’s not that I’m interested in children that much or photographing them—it’s just that they were there.”

It’s just this sort of little magpie thing—that something will catch my eye and I’ll go for it. They don’t have any real meaning; it’s just that they have an allure somehow. The texture and all that stuff that catches your eye, I guess. That leads us into something we probably don’t need to get into now, but there’s something about the way I approach photography, which is very spontaneous. “

Pictures of Children

Critics said:
Her book “At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women” released in 1988 sparked a controversy for her shots of girls in their puberty stage and set the stage for what would be a series of controversies of Sally Mann. Critics called her works child pornography. While the books showed themes like dressing up and napping, critics saw darker themes, such as sexuality and loneliness.


Mann said:
“They were just photographs of my children doing what children do, and they got layered with all of this, often absurd, psychological stuff. You know, these sort of guys sitting around in Yale stroking their beards with their little leather coated jackets saying, “Well, it must mean this...” It means that I was a mother taking pictures of my children.”

Method/Motivations

Sally Mann became immersed in a glass plate, 19th Century aesthetic, when she found a collection of glass negatives that had been taken around Lexington right after the Civil War by a local photographer. The photographs had been taken at the very farm she lived on. She said, “It was an amazing moment when I held up a glass plate and damn, it was a picture of the same cliffs that I've looked at my whole life, exactly as they are now, even the little vines hanging down. Those same vines are still there, and these ancient arborvitae trees which obviously had fallen over 100 years ago—there they were in the glass plate. “

Mann was interested in being able to retrace footsteps of the past and wanted to inject a little of the present into those images.

Process

Mann spends a lot of time at antique malls looking for t lenses with just the right amount of decrepitude. The glue has to be peeling off of the lens elements, a lens is made up of several different pieces of glass which are supposed to stay glued in the right relationship with each other—but Mann’s most prized lens has one of the pieces of glass askew, so when the light comes in it it's refulgent.

Personal Opinion

I really enjoy her work because she is documenting everyday life that surrounds her. Her compositions are perfectly balanced with a broad range of tonal values. I especially love her imperfect view camera aesthetic. Never knowing exactly what you will get from them gives them a precious quality that also plays off her subject matter. I find her images inspiring and something I can look to while working on my thesis project.