Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings at the Essex Peabody Museum in Salem MA
I have always been a little skeptical about the museum experience. Over time, though, I have come to understand that entrance fees are not inherently evil despite being conditioned by years of being able to listen to music online for free. Museums are not necessarily profiteering when they ask for (and sometimes merely suggest) an entrance fee. The tightwad in me balked at spending money to enter places that have a corporate upscale aspect to them (museums) but they are not always subsidized, of course. For the money, Museums allow you to focus intently on an original work that is directly in front of you without distractions--a boon in these vertiginous times. For opportunists, often there is a day set aside for free entry, if you do not mind the resulting crowds (including yourself) that change the museum experience into what English majors might call the Reader-Response, whereby the consumer’s reaction to the text/art becomes inherent to the art itself. This is obvious in certain performance pieces, but I also believe it germane to traditional works. You may as well get your money’s worth in “bonding” with the art. It is however also interesting to observe the people around you sharing the Art experience; their dress, their ages, their cultural backgrounds, their comments…they are all part of “the text,” the “brainstorming,” that is behind uncoding a piece of art. Imho.
Mostly I go to museums while visiting my sister in the Boston metro area and, to make it a communal experience, I try to maintain a conversation with her as we observe what is in front of us. We are older (always!) than how we see ourselves and are on separate trajectories, separate beings with distinct evolving values and experience, and interpreting something in front of both you is a way of taking notes and comparing the life journey. I am also analyzing her response to the work; comparing and contrasting myself with her and with the text of our lives. Days as accreting brushstrokes on the canvas of time.
A "Voigtländer Superb" from 1935 Magnus Gertkemper - Own work
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Camera
Why I Went to See Sally Mann’s work
I have grown to love photographs more and more as I age, and I pore over (into) them acutely, trying to place myself within their content, as if a contemporary, imagining what I would be feeling at that moment and location, what I would be wearing, what my worldview would be. My family background is in the theater, so this qualifies as character analysis and exploration, an actor’s view of the world where every individual is a role, so to speak. I am still trying to decipher the meaning of time and aging (good luck with that) and fleshing out a given moment within a date. It is all very arbitrary yet there is no escaping the temporal markers of the era you find yourself in.
Back to the Peabody Museum. Both my sister and I are self-conscious about being photographed because we were grounded in a family that lived as if under a stage light or a camera; not unusual for theater families. Mann’s work spurred me to later look at her autobiography, Hold Still. I wanted to learn more about her psyche and what she thought of her own work, including what I know most about her - her “troubles” period in the 90s when she was under a withering scrutiny of her nude photos taken of her young children. What I observed at the Peabody instead were her familiar, mostly black-and-white shots, which impart crystalline lines and form to what is represented, and perfectly capture the gothic Southern in her art. Color appears when necessary for effect, such as a forthright shot of one of her children post-nosebleed, an untouched wash of scarlet down a naked chest. I acknowledged the photo’s disarming honesty, with Mann perhaps omitting her child’s face as a nod to his privacy. The expanded size of the photos in the museum context invites you into them like a vista and more closely approximates actual fields of vision, which renders them more “real.”
What are Mann’s opinions on the meaning behind (her) photography? According to Hold Still, she looks at her photos as “autonomous,” with family pictures taking on a life of their own. Pictures to her evolve into “some rudiment of the eternal,” which to me somehow rings true in her black-and-white format. She warrants that it is dangerous to surmise a clear narrative from what is captured on film, and that photographs “economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time's continuum.” Within her photos, Mann counterintuitively rejects the concept that she is seeing her children; to her, the subjects are “figures on silvery paper slivered out of time.” This “eternal” was her intent, anyway, in shooting her children sans clothing, as seen in the highest forms of art in the world’s canon, and as she herself grew up on the very same isolated farm footing the Virginia Appalachians. At the Peabody, I acknowledged the aforementioned bloodied child along with a daughter’s face in puffy distortion from an allergic reaction. Mann’s earlier critics might accuse her of indifference or worse in capturing these painful moments in her childrens’ lives, but the artist posits a division of identity when she was taking those shots. They were an act “separate from mothering” and she states that her kids were aware of the difference. When she stepped behind the camera “she was a photographer and the kids were actors.” They were given a final agency in that she allowed them to edit their photos when she published her collection Immediate Family in 1992.
(--not a Sally Mann photo, but an [lesser] approximation..)
By Joaquim Alves Gaspar - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 2.5
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1530436
So what of the photos exhibited at the Peabody? Her shots of her family are chaste, if still bold. This is twenty-five years after the hubbub over what many then called child porn or child abuse. Her children are all grown now, and my thinking goes that in this day and age Mann would have been even more excoriated for her pictures than she was then. The watershed New York Times Sunday Magazine article back in the day, “The Disturbing Photography of Sally Mann,” did nothing to ameliorate her critics - quite the opposite, actually, as evident from the outset by the title. Mann says that her quotations in the article were “lacking in context or sense of irony or self-deprecating humor.” These are concepts that confirm the problematics of locating the full meaning of a photograph. The closest she approximates the terms used by her naysayers is what she calls in her autobiography a parental "carnality," devoid of the sexually erotic, a “primal parental eroticism.” She thought of her childrens’ photos as simply, miraculously, and sensuously beautiful.
Mann ultimately blames herself today for what she calls her naivete, her “arrogant certitude that everyone must see the world as she did” when she sought the timeless in her childrens’ posing and in her offering their life moments to the lens. As I perceived at the Peabody, Sally Mann’s field of vision shifted over time from the foreground of her offspring to the background of the environs that she confirms as the root of her artistic vision. She insists that it was the location, the farm, the PLACE, that enabled her childrens’ pictures to be made. She made pictures that she originally thought she could control, made within the “prelapsarian” protection of the farm - “those cliffs, the impassible road, the embracing river.” In her view, in the future, it is hoped that these pictures telling our brief story will remain, but in reality it is the place that will last beyond all of it.
Her more recent work within the same exhibit is replete with stark capture of Rockbridge County Virginia trees and panoramas that look more like Civil War dageuerrotypes, works that embrace certain darkroom errors on her part that provide a cryptic mist and random movement to the composition.
Keith Bryan (Braincandle) - Sharp Top, one of the Peaks of Otter in winter. Taken from Peaks of Otter Lodge (Bedford VA)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mountains#/media/File:SharpTopWinter.jpg
If you would like to experience Sally Mann’s work for yourself, take a look at:
Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings by Sally Mann
The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks by Terry Tempest Williams
What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann (DVD)
Mostly I go to museums while visiting my sister in the Boston metro area and, to make it a communal experience, I try to maintain a conversation with her as we observe what is in front of us. We are older (always!) than how we see ourselves and are on separate trajectories, separate beings with distinct evolving values and experience, and interpreting something in front of both you is a way of taking notes and comparing the life journey. I am also analyzing her response to the work; comparing and contrasting myself with her and with the text of our lives. Days as accreting brushstrokes on the canvas of time.A "Voigtländer Superb" from 1935 Magnus Gertkemper - Own work
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Camera
Why I Went to See Sally Mann’s work
I have grown to love photographs more and more as I age, and I pore over (into) them acutely, trying to place myself within their content, as if a contemporary, imagining what I would be feeling at that moment and location, what I would be wearing, what my worldview would be. My family background is in the theater, so this qualifies as character analysis and exploration, an actor’s view of the world where every individual is a role, so to speak. I am still trying to decipher the meaning of time and aging (good luck with that) and fleshing out a given moment within a date. It is all very arbitrary yet there is no escaping the temporal markers of the era you find yourself in.
Back to the Peabody Museum. Both my sister and I are self-conscious about being photographed because we were grounded in a family that lived as if under a stage light or a camera; not unusual for theater families. Mann’s work spurred me to later look at her autobiography, Hold Still. I wanted to learn more about her psyche and what she thought of her own work, including what I know most about her - her “troubles” period in the 90s when she was under a withering scrutiny of her nude photos taken of her young children. What I observed at the Peabody instead were her familiar, mostly black-and-white shots, which impart crystalline lines and form to what is represented, and perfectly capture the gothic Southern in her art. Color appears when necessary for effect, such as a forthright shot of one of her children post-nosebleed, an untouched wash of scarlet down a naked chest. I acknowledged the photo’s disarming honesty, with Mann perhaps omitting her child’s face as a nod to his privacy. The expanded size of the photos in the museum context invites you into them like a vista and more closely approximates actual fields of vision, which renders them more “real.”
* * *
What are Mann’s opinions on the meaning behind (her) photography? According to Hold Still, she looks at her photos as “autonomous,” with family pictures taking on a life of their own. Pictures to her evolve into “some rudiment of the eternal,” which to me somehow rings true in her black-and-white format. She warrants that it is dangerous to surmise a clear narrative from what is captured on film, and that photographs “economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time's continuum.” Within her photos, Mann counterintuitively rejects the concept that she is seeing her children; to her, the subjects are “figures on silvery paper slivered out of time.” This “eternal” was her intent, anyway, in shooting her children sans clothing, as seen in the highest forms of art in the world’s canon, and as she herself grew up on the very same isolated farm footing the Virginia Appalachians. At the Peabody, I acknowledged the aforementioned bloodied child along with a daughter’s face in puffy distortion from an allergic reaction. Mann’s earlier critics might accuse her of indifference or worse in capturing these painful moments in her childrens’ lives, but the artist posits a division of identity when she was taking those shots. They were an act “separate from mothering” and she states that her kids were aware of the difference. When she stepped behind the camera “she was a photographer and the kids were actors.” They were given a final agency in that she allowed them to edit their photos when she published her collection Immediate Family in 1992.
By Joaquim Alves Gaspar - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 2.5
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1530436
So what of the photos exhibited at the Peabody? Her shots of her family are chaste, if still bold. This is twenty-five years after the hubbub over what many then called child porn or child abuse. Her children are all grown now, and my thinking goes that in this day and age Mann would have been even more excoriated for her pictures than she was then. The watershed New York Times Sunday Magazine article back in the day, “The Disturbing Photography of Sally Mann,” did nothing to ameliorate her critics - quite the opposite, actually, as evident from the outset by the title. Mann says that her quotations in the article were “lacking in context or sense of irony or self-deprecating humor.” These are concepts that confirm the problematics of locating the full meaning of a photograph. The closest she approximates the terms used by her naysayers is what she calls in her autobiography a parental "carnality," devoid of the sexually erotic, a “primal parental eroticism.” She thought of her childrens’ photos as simply, miraculously, and sensuously beautiful.
Mann ultimately blames herself today for what she calls her naivete, her “arrogant certitude that everyone must see the world as she did” when she sought the timeless in her childrens’ posing and in her offering their life moments to the lens. As I perceived at the Peabody, Sally Mann’s field of vision shifted over time from the foreground of her offspring to the background of the environs that she confirms as the root of her artistic vision. She insists that it was the location, the farm, the PLACE, that enabled her childrens’ pictures to be made. She made pictures that she originally thought she could control, made within the “prelapsarian” protection of the farm - “those cliffs, the impassible road, the embracing river.” In her view, in the future, it is hoped that these pictures telling our brief story will remain, but in reality it is the place that will last beyond all of it.
Her more recent work within the same exhibit is replete with stark capture of Rockbridge County Virginia trees and panoramas that look more like Civil War dageuerrotypes, works that embrace certain darkroom errors on her part that provide a cryptic mist and random movement to the composition.
Keith Bryan (Braincandle) - Sharp Top, one of the Peaks of Otter in winter. Taken from Peaks of Otter Lodge (Bedford VA)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mountains#/media/File:SharpTopWinter.jpg
If you would like to experience Sally Mann’s work for yourself, take a look at:
Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings by Sally Mann
The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks by Terry Tempest Williams
What Remains: The Life and Work of Sally Mann (DVD)
- Richard P., West Windsor Branch
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