An invasive act

Photographer Sally Mann won both fame (or was it infamy?) and fortune with the publication in 1992 of Immediate Family, which included many photographs of her naked children. More recently (2015) she won a measure of literary fame with her excellent book Hold Still, a memoir filled with photographs taken by her and members of her family.

Over her creative life, Mann (now in her 70s) has moved from one major project to another, each taking several years. After photographing her young children, she moved on to landscapes, then black men. Later she focused her camera on dead bodies. If you think you are shocked by her nude children, wait until you get to the chapter showing photos of decaying corpses.

Mann describes herself as a rebellious child who refused to wear clothes and, when forced to put them on, refused to take them off, wearing them until they became filthy rags. She offers photos taken by her parents to prove both points. The rebellion continued into college and, indeed, until her marriage to Larry Mann. When they had children of their own, clothing was optional on their isolated farm, and neither she nor her children saw anything wrong with her photographs. Thus she says she was amazed when much of the reaction to Immediate Family was negative. It even led to stalkers and fears for her life. Yet the book continued to sell for years. The public, shocked or not, wanted to own her book.

She writes not just about her own life but about the lives of her parents and grandparents, and about Larry's parents, as well. These details, mostly discovered in attic trunks and supported by old photos also found there, are much more interesting than you might think. Her father, for example, was a physician, yet his abiding passions were art and death, usually art about death. Mann, when she got to the point in her career where she found herself photographing corpses, realized she had much more in common with her father than she once thought. "Am I suggesting here that I was born to redeem my father's lost artistic vision, the child destined to make the art that he was unable to make ...?," she asks. "Maybe I am, and maybe I was. God knows I have tried."

Mann returns again and again to her thoughts about the power and legitimacy of photographic art. At one point she describes photography as "an invasive act, a one-sided exercise of power, the implications of which, when considered in historical perspective, are unsettling." She is speaking here about her pictures of black men, but the words can apply as well to those of her children.