Sally Mann: WR Pa 53, (2001)
I recently heard the photographer Vee Speers described as a Sally Mann for the digital age. To be honest, I'm not quite sure I know what this means. But what I do know is that whilst the former has produced some very striking and beautiful images, not least of all those of children contained in the series entitled The Birthday Party, her work lacks the outrageously disturbing and provocative character of Sally Mann's.
I still vividly recall the shock of seeing a retrospective of Mann's work three years ago at the Photographer's Gallery in London, entitled The Family and the Land. This, her first solo show in the UK, included pictures from Immediate Family (naked children), Deep South (naked vegetation), and What Remains (naked corpses).
The strange, elementary worlds of childhood, landscape and violent decomposition were all brilliantly captured by Mann using antique cameras and techniques so that the images retained their full and often gruesome black and white immediacy. In this sense - and only in this sense - her work might be branded obscene. For there is nothing teasing or titillating in her work; the pictures don't ask to be read erotically any more than they need to be located within some kind of reductive moral context.
Having said that, it's true that the distance of the spectator's gaze is often abolished as in pornography. But Mann is at her very best when the bodies on display are presented in close-up and there is a total collusion and confusion of elements; when faces quite literally become landscapes, as in the untitled but classified picture WR Pa 53, (2001).
Having said that, it's true that the distance of the spectator's gaze is often abolished as in pornography. But Mann is at her very best when the bodies on display are presented in close-up and there is a total collusion and confusion of elements; when faces quite literally become landscapes, as in the untitled but classified picture WR Pa 53, (2001).
It's been said by those who dislike her work, that Mann's photographs ultimately fail to communicate anything and make no positive contribution to society. And it's true that, if anything, they contaminate and corrupt our world of adult human order. I for one didn't come away from the exhibition feeling that I'd learnt anything about the 'innocence of childhood' or the 'beauty of the swamps' - thank God!
Critics who continue to insist on their right to uplift and enlightenment from art, do so because they don't know what else to say and mistakenly believe that banality is better than an open confession of paralysis in the face of something genuinely shocking.
It is, we might conclude, the virulent anti-humanism of Sally Mann's work that accords it greater potency than anything so far produced by Speers. Only Mann has dared to show us the full horror of the human face as lunar surface to be mapped, rather than kissed. And only Mann reminds us not only that little girls have vaginas, but that the vagina itself is nothing other than a freshly dug grave.
I find Mann's photographs at once startling and compelling for their non-erotised, non-pornographic voyeurism - a kind of unsolicited gaze that breaks the silence of a private moment - but also the fascination of decomposing bodies becoming almost indistinguishable from the land that slowly absorbs them.
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