Assignment 5: Virtual essay- Sally Mann

Assignment 5: Virtual essay- Sally Mann

 

Taking this course has enabled me to be exposed to a number of different photos by a number of different photographers. But most of them are male, so I think maybe a female photographer will have some different opinions and style.

Sally Mann (born in Lexington, Virginia, 1951) is one of America’s most renowned photographers. Her many books include Second Sight (1983), At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), Proud Flesh (2009), and The Flesh and the Spirit (2010). She likes to capture candid moments of life, and her most famous and infamous works of photography centered around her own children. Since 1966, she was study in the Putney School on Vermont. At first, she just wanted to use camera to collecting materials for writing. After graduated, she back to Virginia and balance writing and photography. Until she saw a photo by Michael Miley, she was attracted by these printing technologies in nineteenth century.
 

This view of House Mountain was taken by Michael Miley, the famed photographer of Robert E. Lee, more than 130 years ago. (Washington and Lee Special Collections)

She has three children: Emmett (1979), Jessie (1981), and Virginia (1985). Mann is perhaps best known for Immediate Family, her third collection, published in 1992.

The book consists of 65 black-and white photographs of her three children, all under the age of 10. Many of the pictures were taken at the family’s remote summer cabin along the river, where the children played and swam in the nude. Not like other mother’s love, but other touch on darker themes such as insecurity, loneliness, injury, sexuality and death.

Emmett, Jessie and Virginia. 1989
 

Angel, 1992

Some critics deem the photographs of her children bordering on child pornography. I think these children are very free and simple just like the photo “Angle”, when in actuality God intended for us all to be nude.

After her children had grown up, Mann spent more time focusing on that landscape especially the Southern landscape of her own life and childhood, as well as exploring further afield. In 2005, her sixth book, Deep South published, still with 65 black-and-white images, includes landscapes taken from 1992 to 2004 using both conventional 8x10 film and wet plate collodion. She said “wanted to go right into the heart of the deep, dark South.”  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 nineteenth century because of the attraction from Michael Miley. Here she is drawn to locations steeped in historical significance from the American Civil War, which left both literal and metaphoric scars on the trees and the land itself. Using antique cameras and processes throughout, Mann accentuates the sense of age in the subject while embracing the imperfect effects created by her printing process.

 

 
‘Scarred Tree’, 1996 ,from the series Deep South © Sally Mann. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Mann’s dreamy, lyrical image transforms the eerie abandoned woodland into a piece of poetry. The huge photograph of landscape not only the natural south, but talk about the dark human history. In the dark, forgotten paradise of vegetation.

Sally Mann use another way to show the life wither over time.

References:
A brief history of House Mountain By Caroline Helms

http://journalism.wlu.edu/indepth/2011/HouseMountain/History%20of%20HM%20slideshow/History.html

http://vk.com/photo-26953_287242369#/album-26953_3901268

Photography Blog: Deep South by Sally Man
http://www.pphotography.net/2010/10/deep-south-by-sally-mann.html