{"id":21,"date":"2008-10-14T23:04:51","date_gmt":"2008-10-15T07:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/?p=21"},"modified":"2010-02-28T09:32:01","modified_gmt":"2010-02-28T17:32:01","slug":"sally-mann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/2008\/10\/14\/sally-mann-21\/","title":{"rendered":"Sally Mann"},"content":{"rendered":"

A year or so ago I had a look at Sally Mann’s 2003 collection, “What Remains,” her photographic exploration of death. This work was inspired by the death of her father and the suicide of an escaped convict pursued by police onto her farm. A few weeks ago I rented “What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann,” a documentary filmed over the course of a decade.<\/p>\n

Mann is a tremendously gifted photographer. And a magnet for controversy. She first won fame in 1992 for publishing photos of her naked children in “Immediate Family.” Critics\u00a0vilified her as a pornographer. I would not go that far, but\u00a0I did find the images disturbing. One of them shows her then\u00a0five-year old daughter\u00a0Jessie tarted up in pearls and lipstick, and topless. “Dirty Jessie” shows her\u00a0two years earlier\u00a0in what may be a “natural” pose, but it was a bit too close to crossing the line into luridness. And is Mann actually so naive that she does not recognize the double entendre in the photo’s title? With the very real threat posed by child molesters,\u00a0I found the series irresponsible. Nice lighting, though.<\/p>\n

I rented the documentary largely to hear Mann explain in her own words her thinking behind “Immediate Family” and “What Remains.” Basically I wanted to hear her justify her work. Instead I came away feeling creeped out.<\/p>\n

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Photo: Sally Mann<\/p><\/div>\n

There is a\u00a0scene near the end of the movie “American Beauty” in which Kevin Spacey’s character, Lester Burnham, is slumped dead in a kitchen chair, having been shot in the back of the head. (Not really a spoiler: Spacey’s narration at the start of the film informs you he’ll be dead in a year.)\u00a0The still smiling corpse is discovered by Lester’s daughter and her boyfriend Ricky.\u00a0\u00a0Ricky\u00a0says “wow,” stoops and smiles back at Spacey’s corpse, finding the same kind of beauty in this as he did in a dead bird he had filmed. He had said, “Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world I feel like I can’t take it, like my heart’s going to cave in.” But as he rises, Ricky gets a good look at the gaping wound at the back of Spacey’s head. His smile fades, replaced by revulsion and horror. He sees that this corpse is not beautiful. It is a dead\u2014a murdered\u2014human being. He has been cured of his morbid fascinations.<\/p>\n

Not so for Mann. At one point in the documentary Mann visits a forensic training facility,\u00a0a forest strewn with\u00a0decomposing bodies. Mann squats down next to one of the corpses and remarks upon the beautiful color of the decay. This is land dedicated to train investigators to solve murders, to rid the world of this ugliness, and she is focused on the symmetry of a leaf-shaped chunk of flesh missing from the back of a victim’s thigh. Nice composition, by the way.<\/p>\n

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Photo: Sally Mann<\/p><\/div>\n

In her book and the film, Mann speaks with both\u00a0matter-of-factness and reverence about death. She recognizes\u00a0that when a person dies they are no longer there,\u00a0but also feels that\u00a0the land\u00a0is consecrated\u2014made holy\u2014by death. When her beloved pet dog dies, she buries it in a steel metal cage. When sufficient time has elapsed, she digs\u00a0up\u00a0the skeletal remains and lays them out in her studio to photograph. To disturb this animal’s grave and use it in this manner seems nothing less than desecration,\u00a0robbing it of its sacredness, its holiness.<\/a><\/p>\n

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Photo: Sally Mann<\/p><\/div>\n

Mann never really addresses her judgement in printing photos of her naked children in the documentary. She remarks that her children are photogenic and take direction well. She claims that she was surprised by the controversy, and seems reluctant to show work that will bring up those questions again. However, while curating her “What Remains” show, Mann decides that the perfect way to balance and round out the exhibit is to include portraits of her children’s faces. She says that this is an affirmation of life, but the photos closely resemble death masks, almost as though these were the faces of the corpses she had photographed. Why would she do this? There is a taboo against photographs of dead Americans (but not foreigners). This was enforced by the Pentagon for soldiers but has been applied to news reports of civilian deaths as well. The saying goes that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” What better way to attract attention to her show than to chose another hot button issue, photos of death, and find a way to tie in her now famous children again?<\/p>\n

Maybe I am being too harsh. Maybe Mann is not an exploitative, immoral,\u00a0publicity hound. Perhaps\u00a0she is just naive, or possibly even enlightened. Regardless,\u00a0the next time I admire the work of a photographer whose composition or technique reminds me of Mann’s, I’ll qualify my praise: “Your work reminds me of Sally Mann, without\u00a0all that creepiness.”<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Michael Singman-Aste
\nPostdiluvian Photo<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A year or so ago I had a look at Sally Mann’s 2003 collection, “What Remains,” her photographic exploration of death. This work was inspired by the death of her father and the suicide of an escaped convict pursued by police onto her farm. A few weeks ago I rented “What Remains: The Life and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23,7,3],"tags":[10,78],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artists","category-musings","category-rants","tag-death","tag-sally-mann"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pPxQO-l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":890,"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions\/890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.postdiluvianphoto.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}