Sally Mann.
By Pietro Daprano.
Having met Sally Mann in 2016 was an exciting experience. She is a woman with an acute intelligence and sensitive power that paralyzes anyone. In the defense of her role as a mother, she said: “The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. ”
The book “Hold Still. A Memoir with Photographs”. (2015) tells of motherhood, situations in Mann’s environment, the value and effectiveness aspects of one image compared to another, but also talks about the price the Manns paid for her family’s photographs. The narrative in “Hold Still” works on a visceral and emotional level.
Sally Mann is one of the essential photographers which I have researched for years, and I can say without fear that this spontaneous act responds to a deep and powerful way of life that she has known how to articulate her photographic stories related to the golden dreaminess of the landscape of her surroundings, the intimacy of her family and the transit of the ephemeral between childhood and adolescence.
The last two topics named correspond to the most critical lines that led to her acclaimed photography since it is such a sincere and real speech, capable of provoking hasty judgments to people with hidden or latent behaviors around social prejudices. This strange ability to take advantage of human emotions by Mann, was a challenge that required art and society to make a new exercise of comprehension in the face of the controversy of her photographs.
From that body of work, iconic photographs emerge, that mostly participated in other editorial projects such as “Immediate Family,” a book about the childhood of Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia, children of Mann. The book, first published in 1992 by Aperture, contains intriguing images of them many times without clothes in everyday scenes on their farm in the hills of Virginia, a wild place away from public transport, water, electricity, and of course, without internet and phone.
The decision to stay away from social vices and prejudices offered Mann the chance to see her children grow healthily and document their natural way of living, growing, and developing. By taking those images out of that context, they awakened primitive projections in social behavior to the point of seeking to compromise her practice.
Sally Mann’s photographs manage to remove the critical and emotional perception of those not willing to observe art over their interpretative deficiencies, fears, passions, and judgments. In other words, “Immediate Family” was not understood as the revelation of a sublime dignity, it was reduced as a dark form of destiny to threaten primitive behaviors.
