Sally Mann is a contemporary American Photographer. Mann is widely known for her 1992 book, “Immediate Family”. Here, she documented the timeline of human growth and conditions through large format, black and white photographs of her, sometimes, nude children. The piece was both critically acclaimed and denunciated. Her use of large format film to depict intense details in her subjects began early on in her career as a high school student at the Putney School in Vermont. Born in Lexington, Virginia in 1951, Mann was the youngest of three children and the only girl. Her father introduced her to photography. As a teen he handed down to her a 5x7 camera, which, she used to take a nude black and white portrait of a classmate during her days at Putney. This style would foreshadow the majority of her career.
Later, she would experiment with the wet collodion process. This highly labor intensive and temperamental technique entails coating a glass plate with light sensitive chemicals and inserting the plate, all on site with timed precision, into an 8x10 or larger camera to create a detailed yet decaying image. From this process she developed multiple bodies of work including: “Still Time” published in 1994, “Sally Mann-Mother Land: Recent Landscapes of Georgia and Virginia” in 1997. The largest collection of these images were shown in “Deep South: Landscapes of Louisiana and Mississippi” in 1999 where standing under the black cloth covering her view camera, she shot the locations of Civil War battles in the original photographic form of the times. She continued with this technique and in 2003 published her fifth book, “What Remains”. This piece was based on an exhibit previously shown at the Corcoran Museum. Here she depicts the remains and decomposition of both animals and humans and revisits the Civil War landscapes of her previous works. The book ends with riveting close up portraits of her children symbolizing life from death as by way of the earth giving back. During an interview for the “What Remains” 2005 documentary film, by Steven Cantor, Mann is featured at home working in her studio where she describes her process and explains, “I’m sort of praying for the Angel of Uncertainty to visit my plate.”
Mann has been widely recognized and awarded regardless of her critics during the years of her early work. In 2001, Time magazine named her “America’s Best Photographer”. Her works are included in the permanent collections of internationally distinguished museums including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of New York City. In 2006, Mann received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from the Corcoran Museum.
New releases by Mann include “Proud Flesh” in 2009, utilizing more capture by wet collodian, she visually describes the connected yet less than perfect relationship of a married couple of almost forty years. Here, she documents the deteriorating effects that muscular dystrophy has had on her husband, Larry. Lastly, a forthcoming publication in later 2010, “Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit” will demonstrate the vast collection of her human figure studies throughout the thirty plus years of her career.
(Photo Credit: Sally Mann, "Candy Cigarette" 1989)
One of my favorite photographers of all time. I was fortunate enough to speak with her and tell her so. A very thoughtful and thought provoking person/photographer. Nice entry.
ReplyDelete