The ‘family’ element of the title comprises Mann’s early series
Immediate Family and the newer series Faces, both of which depict her
children at various ages. The series Deep South represents the
landscape, portraying images made across the south of the United States.
The more recent body of work, What Remains brings together both strands
of the exhibition, through its examination of how bodies, as they
decompose, merge into the land itself.
Sally Mann (b.1951, USA) first gained prominence for Immediate
Family (1984–94) a series of intimate and revealing portraits of her
three young children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia. Taken over a ten-year
period, Mann depicts them playing, swimming and acting to the camera in
and around their homestead in Lexington, Virginia. Born out of a
collaborative process between mother and child, the work encapsulates
their childhood in all its rawness and innocence.
Mann followed Immediate Family by focusing on the land itself in her
series Deep South (1996–98). Here she is drawn to locations steeped in
historical significance from the American Civil War, which left both
literal and metaphoric scars on the trees and the land itself. Using
antique cameras and processes throughout, Mann accentuates the sense of
age in the subject while embracing the imperfect effects created by her
printing process.
What Remains (2000–04) seeks to further connect human contact to the
land and how the body eventually returns to and becomes a part of the
land itself. This concept led Mann to photograph decomposing cadavers at
the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility,
Knoxville, where human decomposition is studied in a variety of, mainly
outdoor, settings. What Remains deals directly with the subject of
death, still a social taboo. As with her other work, Mann’s subjects are
sensitively handled and beautifully realised, encouraging us to reflect
upon our own mortality and place within nature’s order.
In the most recent series Faces (2004), Mann turns the camera once
more on her children. Closing in on their faces and using several
minutes of exposure time, these works act as a commemoration of the
living. Again Mann takes the accidental drips and marks created by the
wet collodian process and makes them a key feature of her work.
The Family and the Land: Sally Mann at The Photographers’ Gallery is
an edited version of a touring exhibition, conceived by Sally Mann in
collaboration with Hasse Persson, Director, Borås Museum of Modern Art,
Sweden. It has been presented at Fotomuseum Den Hague and the Musée de
l‘Elysée, Lausanne as well as in Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Helsingborg,
and Copenhagen. Tomado de: http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=38723