Sally Mann's Nostalgic Vision

Sally Mann

Depicting dismal family portraits and eerie landscapes from the Deep South, Sally Mann, an American photographer, shows dynamic imagery of black and white among the subjects in her work.  Creating these images, she shows concepts of death, sexuality, and sensuality to society, mainly in the U.S., capturing the fights during the Culture Wars and the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) supporting to her photography.  In Mann’s work, she takes pictures of her family and landscapes in a non-traditional format, which gives a scratched and unfinished feel, with damaged cameras and lenses to create nostalgia in her photography.  Among her fellow peers, photographers Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit controversy in their styles of sexuality and death with the support of the NEA.  Since these artist are trying to draw societies attention to freedom of speech, many critics and spectators aren’t comfortable with the subjects portrayed in these images because they don’t understand its purpose.

New Mothers, Sally Mann

In the Immediate Family (1992), the book and later exhibit, her third collection and most notable achievement of Mann’s.  New Mothers, which was shown as part of the Immediate Family series, sparked disturbing imagery of three children in Spring 1992 when the first exhibit was critiqued at the Houk Friedman Gallery in New York.  In New Mothers, Mann is depicting her children, Emmett, 12, Jessie, 10, and Virginia, 7, acting as adults at their adolescence.  Since she puts her children in this theme of adulthood, Mann views her children as if they were living their adulthood in society.  She admires her children by dressing them up as adults and took the picture as her children posed naturally in a family setting, but portrays the imagery in death and perceptions of sexuality.

The Rehearsal Place, Sally Mann

After Immediate Family, she was already a well known photographer to admirers of her black and white line of work.  Other books were focused on the decomposing bodies and portraits in What Remains (2003) and landscapes in Deep South (2005).  In her fifth book, What Remains, divided into five parts, which depicts dead, decay, and studies of children portraits.  An example of these studies, The Rehearsal Place exhibits a child immersed just showing her hair spread among the water.  In other sections of the book, images show off gruesome imagery of decay in the process and bones.

Deep South Series, Sally Mann

In Deep South, the book reveals quite the opposite of What Remains and captures the landmarks of where she made a 65 black-and-white landscapes taken from 1992 to 2004.  The images were constructed by 8x10 film and wet plate collodion.  With the carefully selected pictures, she assembles a collage of her best compositions into one collection of imagery.  Some examples of her landscape photography show off some haunting scenes of battlefields during the Civil War.

Lewis Law Portfolio, Sally Mann