60 Sally Mann, Immediate Family, 1990 "I do consider myself a Southern photographer. I believe [my] work has that ineffable Southern quality, whatever it is. At the very least there's a kind of a humidity to the photographs that is Southern. And the way they look, their physical presence, has a Southern feel to it. Oh, the obsession with place, with family, with both the personal and the social past; the susceptibility to myth; the love of this light, which is all our own; and the readiness to experiment with dosages of romance that would be fatal to most late-20th-century artists. In that sense, Southern artists are like certain of our mountain religious folk, who, in their devotions, subject themselves to snake bites that would kill or disable anyone else. What snake venom is to them, romanticism is to the Southern artist: a terrible risk, and a ticket to transcendence."
Mike Johnston, Sally Mann, non datĂŠ
Sally Mann, in "Southern Obsessions, Southern Exposure", The Chronicle of High Education, 21.05.1999 Source : http://chronicle.com/subscribe/login?url=/weekly/v45/i37/37b07201.htm
Sally Mann at Houk Friedman - New York, New York Anastasia Aukeman, Art in America, February, 1993
We know that time cannot be held, but Sally Mann's intimate photographs of her son and two daughters in the achingly familiar poses of childhood make us wish that we could suspend it for a moment. The 26 photos in this show, titled "Immediate Family," were selected from a larger and ongoing body of work of the same title. In this series Mann makes the private lives of her growing children the focus of her camera's intense gaze. These photographs are more sumptuous and enticing than those in At Twelve, the book that presented Mann's images of adolescent girls. In part this is because she has developed a technical style that is more adept. Since 1984, the year she began the "Immediate Family" project, Mann has been working with an 8-by-10-inch view camera that is 100 years old. The resulting images are uncropped, with rich dark tones and brilliant highlights that often seem to emanate from the very skin of her children. For some shots she attaches the lens of a 4-by-5-inch view camera, which causes the 8-by-10-inch photograph to disappear into soft-focus around the edges and gives the work a sentimental, turn-of-the-century aura. Mann labors extensively over all her photos, first making mental sketches of each shot, then writing notes, then discarding many preliminary shots; finally she spends a great deal of time on the prints, burning and dodging in the darkroom to achieve the right effect. Very little goes on in her work that is unpremeditated. Mann's staged vignettes frequently call to mind the allegorical narratives of Julia Margaret Cameron. Fallen Child (1989) is a soft-focus, theatrical photograph of Mann's second daughter, Virginia, lying naked in the grass with her eyes closed and her curls fanned out around her head. She looks like an angel dropped rudely from heaven, and we are reminded of the petulant spritechild of Cameron's Venus Chiding Cupid. Kiss Goodnight (1988) depicts the two sisters as innocent lovers locked in a kiss and is clearly derived from Cameron's The Double Star. Both women create very sensual, often overtly sexual images of children. While Mann's images of her daughters speak volumes about her bond with them, her treatment of her son, Emmett, is often self-conscious. Perhaps Mann feels more attuned to a young girl's childhood or, more simply, perhaps Emmett has less patience with posing than his sisters. Her few depictions of men, meanwhile, contain a deliberately menacing subtext, and she often confronts the darker aspects of childhood in a way some viewers find disturbing. Rodney Plogger at 6:01 (1989), for example, shows Virginia from her chin down, naked, held between a man's stocky legs. In a perfect world this would be a casual, affectionate pose, but our increasing awareness of child abuse braces us for the worst - a predatory man "touching" an innocent child. In this and other photographs, such as Damaged Child (1984), Emmett's Bloody Nose (1985) or The Terrible Picture (1989) Mann elicits every parent's fear of sexual or physical abuse for his or her child, but with the same frustrating ambiguity one encounters in everyday life. Is the boy's nose bloody because he fell off his bike, or because he was struck? Mann offers no easy answers. What she gives us instead is much better: an honest coming to grips with the complexities of childhood, all the while celebrating a world in constant flux. Source au 07 10 15 : http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n2_v81/ai_13395615