Immediate Family
from Aperture
Taken against the Arcadian backdrop of her woodland home in Virginia, Sally Mann's extraordinary, intimate photographs of her children-- Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia-- reveal truths that embody the individuality of her immediate family and ultimately take on a universal quality. Mann states that her work is "about everybody's memories, as well as their fears," a theme echoed by Reynolds Price in his eloquent, poignantly reflective essay accompanying the photographs in Immediate Family.
With sublime dignity, acute wit, and feral grace, Mann's pictures explore the eternal struggle for autonomy-- the holding on, and the breaking away. This is the stuff of which Greek dramas are made: impatience, terror, self-discovery, self-doubt, pain, vulnerability, role-playing, and a sense of immortality, all of which converge in Sally Mann's astonishing photographs.
A traveling exhibition of Immediate Family, organized by Aperture, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in the Fall of 1992.
What Remains
by Sally Mann
from Bulfinch
Internationally acclaimed artist, Sally Mann, named 'America's Best' photographer in 2001 by Time magazine, offers this deeply felt meditation on morality. Renowned for her candid portrayal of family life (Immediate Family), her revealing study of girlhood (At Twelve), and landscapes from the American South (Mother Land and Deep South), internationally acclaimed photographer Sally Mann has produced a powerful new body of work on the one subject that affects us all. In WHAT REMAINS, a five-part meditation on mortality, Mann focuses her lens on the ineffable divide between body and soul, the means by which life takes leave of this earth, and the manner in which it rejoins it. Mann's new photographs are by turns shocking and sublime. An armed fugitive is hunted down by police. She photographs the scars left on her property after the incident. A series of brooding, otherworldly landscapes made at the Civil War battlefield of Antietam is followed by a group of close-up portraits of Mann's own children, floating in the inky black atmosphere of the nineteenth-century ambrotype; another series taken at a forensics study site offers an unflinching look at the process of decomposition, as do images of a beloved pet greyhound-long since departed. Made with the collodion process, using glass plates, the resulting images are at once painterly, sculptural, and photographic.
At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women
from Aperture
The young women in Mann's unflinching, large-format photographs, however, are not victims. They return the viewer's gaze with a disturbing equanimity. Poet Jonathan Williams writes, "Sally Mann's girls are the ones who do the hard looking in At Twelve-- be up to it!" Partly this is a result of the remarkable rapport that Mann is able to establish with her subjects.
Herself the mother of three, Mann has lived most of her life in Lexington, Virginia, where all of these pictures were taken. In fact, many of the families of the young women were cared for by her father, who was the town doctor for over forty years. So while At Twelve is an intensely personal vision of what it means, now, to be twelve and female, each of Mann's subjects is allowed the opportunity to frankly return our wondering, reminiscent gaze and to have a history of her own, rooted in a specific place at a particular moment-- at twelve.
Deep South
by Sally Mann
from Bulfinch
This evocative collection by internationally acclaimed photographer Sally Mann is a masterful reinvention of the art of landscape photography. Sally Mann remains among the most innovative, talked-about, and daring artists working with a camera today. DEEP SOUTH is a much anticipated collection of her exquisite, ethereal landscape photographs, taken in the years since she rose to international fame with her groundbreaking book Immediate Family. The photographs in DEEP SOUTH, many produced with the 19th-century collodion process and a variety of toning techniques, capture what Mann calls the radical light of the American South. Borrowing methods favored by early masters of landscape photography, Mann bends classic craftsmanship to serve the expressive needs of a heightened contemporary sensibility. Serendipitous technical imperfections, such as light leaks or scratches on negatives, echo the accidental, chaotic workings of time. From ghostly images of historic battlefields to painterly visions of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and her native Virginia, Manns landscape photographs transport the viewer to another time and place.
Still Time
from Aperture
Still Time celebrates an artist whose acute perceptions and imagination embrace not only the photographs of children for which she is renowned, but also earlier landscapes, and the unexpected, compelling forays into color and abstract photography.
The sixty images include abstract platinum prints, Cibachromes and Polaroids, landscapes, portraits of women and twelve-year-olds, and her celebrated family pictures.
So the Story Goes: Photographs by Tina Barney, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, and Larry Sultan (Art Institute of Chicago)
by Katherine A. Bussard
from Art Institute of Chicago
Each of these artists has created highly personal, shifting, and intriguing visions of his or her life. The works range from Tina Barney’s orchestrated depictions of her friends and family in affluent New England settings to Nan Goldin’s unabashed portrayal of intimate, and often brutally honest, moments. Sally Mann turned to her children and their surroundings as her subject, and Larry Sultan has accomplished something similar in his depictions of his parents. Philip-Lorca diCorcia offers up his “storybook life” in photographs that—like others in this group—span nearly twenty years.
So the Story Goes is arranged in portfolio format and features beautiful color reproductions of about twenty photographs by each artist. With an introductory essay that examines the development of personal narrative in photography, as well as insightful entries on each artist, the book analyzes how these works tell a life’s story.
Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry
Aperture - On Location With: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Graciela Iturbide, Barbara Kruger, Sally Mann, Andres Serrano, Clarissa Sligh
by Aperture
from Aperture
The Appalachian housewife: Sally Mann at the George Eastman House.(Critical Essay): An article from: Afterimage
This digital document is an article from Afterimage, published by Visual Studies Workshop on January 1, 2005. The length of the article is 825 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The Appalachian housewife: Sally Mann at the George Eastman House.(Critical Essay)
Author: Amber Hares
Publication: Afterimage (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2005
Publisher: Visual Studies Workshop
Volume: 32 Issue: 4 Page: 13(1)
Article Type: Critical Essay
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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