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Only dead photographers receive the kind of attention Sally Mann’s been getting. When her exhibit of photographs, Immediate Family, opened at New York’s Houk-Friedman Gallery last year, Mann received reviews in the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker. Last September the New York Times Magazine featured an article about her life and family, “The Disturbing Photographs Of Sally Mann,” and one of her photographs appeared on its cover. She’s even been hired by Mamiya to pitch their equipment in full-page ads.
Mann has merely exchanged smiles and lollipops for the sullen, empty-hearted look of Calvin Klein.
Mann can be awfully good, and occasionally wonderful. She has a passionate feeling for light and the encroachments of shadow, and a breathtaking capacity to make photographs that are both dramatic and beautiful. A naked, incandescent girl hangs from a bar on the deck of a house in the late afternoon (“Hayhook, 1989”); the same child, only younger, stands at the edge of a field, delicately extending the sides of her white Easter dress like little wings (“Easter Dress, 1986”). Unlike the photo-documentarist who believes that the world should be revealed on its own terms, austerely, and without the manipulations of art, Mann, a no-holds-barred darkroom wizard, clearly puts her faith in theatrical effects — children in morning sunlight are frequently surrounded by a faint ring of darkness, the deepening shadows of an unexpected late afternoon.
Nevertheless, good as Mann is, the reason for all this sudden media attention has less to do with pure visual merit than with the fact that, like Robert Mapplethorpe, many of her photographs proudly feature naked children — a taboo that (at least among most serious photographers) can never be broken quietly. Less controversial, though equally disquieting, is Mann’s tendency to blur the line between truth-telling and contrivance — a distinction that has historically protected photography’s documentary tradition from the soft deceptions of advertising.
Even the title of Mann’s new book, Immediate Family, is misleading. The book is not about family as such, but about her beautiful children, Jesse, Emmett, and Virginia. Though Mann has been married to the same man for many years, there is no person in the book who can be distinguished as either a father or a husband. Adults appear in the photographs, but they are never given a focus that matters; they seem to represent a background of wrinkled mortality against which the soft and unwrinkled and vigorous beauty of Mann’s children can be revealed. As a consequence, the book often seems to be promoting the photogenic; and though it’s true that this sort of beauty offers its own rewards, I find myself wishing that Mann’s children were a little more ungainly or lumpy or simply less experienced in front of a camera — anything that would help them escape the smooth, almost commercial superiority of their surface. In a few photographs, Mann, a darkroom god dispensing favors, fosters the illusion of children who seem to glow with the faint radiance of angels.
Unfortunately, Mann’s attempt to lend a certain modern credibility to this angelic enterprise is somewhat strained. Immediate Family contains a few photographs of her handsome children with swollen faces (“Damaged Child”) and bleeding stitches (“Jesse’s Cut”), not to mention one particularly unpleasant photograph of what seems to be the burned legs of a corpse stretched out on a table — replete with a coroner’s tag — but which turns out to be the legs of a child covered in flour paste. Unavoidably, these photographs of bumps and scratches remind me of other, less privileged children for whom suffering is not an artistic opportunity. I suppose Mann would like the viewer to admire the grit and integrity of her steely gaze — that of a parent who would photograph a bloody child before wiping the blood away. But is such stoicism admirable? To whom?
Part of Mann’s dilemma derives from impatience — she wants more out of a photograph than her equipment can deliver. The large-format camera, which gives her work its glorious tonality, is designed to photograph a subject that is either posed or stationary. Trying to photograph children (naturally active and inconstant creatures) with such a ponderous recording instrument is close to impossible unless the children agree to some kind of petrifaction. Of course many wonderful photographs have been taken this way: for example, Bruce Davidson’s poignant photograph in East 100th Street of two little black girls in white dresses, sitting quietly together on a couch. Such posed portraiture encourages us to gaze at the surface of lively creatures and read inward. On the other hand, lighter, portable 35-mm cameras — which Mann doesn’t use — loosen things up. Lacking the great descriptive power of a large-format camera, the smaller camera promotes the virtues of fast looking, of surprise and non-intrusion; in other words, the portraiture of spontaneity. One recalls Cartier-Bresson’s photographs of children unaware of his camera, the unmediated, rampant look of children at play — raw data that doesn’t exist in posed photographs.
Mann refuses to choose between these two very different modes of portraiture; she wants her images to contain both the gracious tonality of the view camera and the natural liveliness of the 35-mm — an almost impossible requirement. Possibly she hoped to emulate the wonderfully relaxed, large-format images of Emmett Gowin, whose Photographs (1976), among other things, managed to capture the unpredictable friendliness of family life. But Gowin (after whom Mann named her son Emmett) is an odd case. For one thing, his images spring from a unique, open-hearted pleasure in all sorts of things. Photographing his family meant “extended” family — wife and children and nephews and grandmothers — as well as sunlight, the nuttiness of children, his wife’s mysterious beauty. More importantly, Gowin invented a new way to make photographs that corresponded to his own artless pleasure in the way things are. Using a 4" × 5" view camera on a tripod as if it were the family Brownie, he often photographed his subjects head-on, without fancy framing. Gowin assumed correctly — and with tremendous originality — that the very intensity of his gaze would be reinforced by the descriptive precision of his camera, and that this intensity would reveal the love and respect he felt for his subjects more effectively than the traditional calculations of art-making. He was right.
Unlike Gowin, who challenged the accepted notion of the beautiful, Mann wants her photographs to shimmer with traditional big-time beauty — large-format beauty that takes one’s breath away. She also wants to depict the lively existential drama of her children’s lives. Given the irreconcilable conflict between her intentions and her equipment, her solution is to falsify reality. Thus, many of Mann’s photographs in Immediate Family are not photographs of her children living their lives, but reenactments, contrived images of her children imitating themselves. These photogenic children wander around naked, play board games, gather eggs, sleep in the grass, and, like all higher creatures, avoid anything that might resemble a television set.
Does this contrivance matter? I suppose that depends upon whether one admires photographs because they serve truth, imperfect though it is, or because they serve our human longing for beautiful and well-managed deceptions. Contrived photographs, from the staged, sentimental tableaux of the nineteenth-century pictorialists to postmodern, consciously dramatic self-constructions, have long been a part of the art landscape. If contrivance works, fine, but there’s nothing wrong with asking, to what purpose? The question is particularly relevant with regard to photographs because they, unlike paintings, have a privileged claim to objectivity and have, consequently, been a particularly effective tool for falsifying and censoring the way things are.
Immediate Family is full of tricks and quicksand, especially for the inattentive traveler. Photographs that are passionately literal and represent the “unvarnished” truth (a frontal view of Emmett’s penis can hardly be faked) are mixed with — and thereby lend a vague authenticity to — photographs that are entirely scripted. The result is what we have become familiar with on tabloid news shows like “Hard Copy” and “Unsolved Mysteries,” in which hired actors and real victims “simulate” an actual crime: truth and illusion blended into an ersatz documentary. That Mann’s work has been treated so respectfully by critics is an indication of how gracefully she integrates her contrived images among her real ones — as well as of a disinclination on the part of photography critics to maintain the once-respected distinction between fact and fiction. Immediate Family, an amalgam of fantasy and fact, falls into the very seductive realm of the Almost Real, a category it shares with those “authorized” biographies that weave legend and fact together to manufacture a life that is more exciting than yours or mine.
I wish that Mann’s photographs were more often the real thing. I wish that Mann’s kids were more often surprised on film, in their unique vulnerabilities, instead of posed by their mother — for, quite frankly, these children, in spite of their young faces, don’t always look like children. Oh, sometimes they do. Especially the littlest one, Virginia — too young to wear the mask of cool indifference so often affected by her siblings, she frequently looks a little confused, like a child. But more often than not, these kids have been made to resemble the kind of adults you want to run from: the posed and peevish and superior models who stare at you from the pages of expensive magazines, their eyes full of contempt and moral fatigue. In fact, Mann’s children appear to be — in the context of these photographs — sort of mean. Emmett constantly looks petulant, Jesse stares at the camera as if daring it to capture her beauty, and even Virginia, too young for this stuff, strikes sexy little poses that suggest she’s no pushover.
Of course these kids, being kids, are pushovers — they have been pushed over by an artistic idea. One doesn’t need to be a psychologist to realize that the arrogant self-possession these kids frequently manifest is an adult fiction that has been imposed on them. Children aren’t little, self-contained adults without beards and breasts, but growing and sometimes goofy creatures whose existence can be visualized only by a consciousness willing to accept their fabulous vulnerability. Mann’s children — the real ones — have been pushed over and crowded out, to be replaced by other children, “conceptual” children, who seem to be full of mystery, who stand around like beautiful statuary, drained of spontaneity. Hoping to challenge the sentimental clichés of child portraiture, Mann has merely exchanged smiles and lollipops for the sullen, empty-hearted look of Calvin Klein.
One photograph tells it all — “Emmett And The White Boy.” Hand on hip, arm against tree, a suntanned Emmett stares dourly at the camera. He wears the look of a professional model — nothing fazes him. Beside him, “the white boy” leans against a tree. He’s a little plump. In this realm of sulky angels, he’s imperfect — a pale, indoor, town kid who’s not even dignified by a name. Unlike Emmett, this boy is suspicious of the camera that is pointed at him; his hand covers his mouth. Of course he knows he’s being set up. He doesn’t yet know how he’s being set up, but he knows. Unlike Emmett, whose eyes seem lifeless, the eyes of “the white boy” are bright and alive and full of questions. In this book full of camera-ready children, this vulnerable and very real glance is an unexpected gift.
It is perhaps inevitable that the issues surrounding Mann’s decision to publish photographs of her naked children are more complicated than the photographs themselves. Though Mann has plenty of critics who find any kind of nakedness despicable, still other critics, right-minded and liberal-hearted, are bothered for different reasons by this nakedness, and by an element in some of her photographs that is frankly erotic. In Richard B. Woodward’s article in the New York Times Magazine, Mann is said to have bristled at the use of the word “erotic” to describe her work, but such a response seems disingenuous. She clearly knows and exploits the publicity value of this forbidden territory: the cover photograph of her 1988 book At Twelve, for example, visually draws one’s attention to the precisely delineated crotch of a twelve-year-old girl wearing tight shorts.
The issue here isn’t simple obscenity. Mann is an artist in the most recognizable sense of the word: a unique sensibility at work shaping beautiful artifacts. As such, the example of her exquisite craftsmanship is a clear social virtue. Still, there’s more to a photograph — or any work of art, for that matter — than its aesthetic merits. A work of art can be “wrong” even when it achieves a certain formal perfection. In Mann’s case, what’s wrong is an unmistakable tendency, at least in some of the photographs, toward voyeurism — a sly, visual presumption that is particularly disquieting because the sexualized subjects are children. While it is true that these photographs, full of erotic innuendo, have nothing to do with the blatant exploitation of child pornography, they do raise the troubling question of whether children have a right to a certain kind of privacy that shouldn’t be violated by anybody, even their parents — especially their parents, who have an emotional leveraging power over their offspring that is essentially unlimited.
Unfortunately, Mann’s own interpretation of what she is doing rings false. In the introductory essay to Immediate Family — in which she lovingly recalls her own innocent childhood, when she was encouraged to run naked through the same Virginia countryside (“an Indian, a cliff-dweller, a green spirit”) — Mann suggests that as a photographer she is simply taking her father’s habit of impish and irreverent bohemianism to a higher artistic level. Her essay includes snapshots of her father’s whimsical handiwork (for instance, an erection carved out of wood with Christmas-ball testicles), clearly meant to shock his Baptist neighbors. To Mann, such a maverick heritage seems to have granted her the genetic permission necessary to photograph her own children naked.
What was nonconforming about the father, however, has become pure calculation in the daughter — awkward spontaneity giving way to organized refinements of art. The result is the disappearance of innocence (which can never be organized) and something more: the suspicion that Mann is exploiting her children’s innocence (which she visualizes as a naked innocence) in order to create sly, high-tone, baby-doll fantasies — extremely marketable stuff as long as it maintains its identity as art.
Of course I’m not referring to those playful photographs in which her children smoke candy cigarettes (“Candy Cigarette”) or pretend to be mothers pushing baby carriages (“The New Mothers”). No, I mean other photographs, also with chaste titles, that impose upon her subjects a visual language rich with pedophilic implications: “Naptime,” for example, in which one of her daughters lies on a bed, swathed in satin and lace, her long hair splayed dramatically across a pillow, gazing up at the camera with an expression of soft expectancy, while beside her, Emmett’s torso, naked except for loose underpants, reclines in the shadows. Or “Kiss Goodnight,” a close-up photograph of a deep kiss between Jesse and Virginia, mouths open and eyes closed. Obviously there’s something unsettling about children playing at grown-up sexuality, but even more so is the suspicion (based on technical considerations) that this particular photograph was staged. Why? Mann knows very well that even if her children were exchanging an innocent goodnight kiss, the point of the photograph is entirely different. Does she want to offer us, like a good Freudian, a peek at the polymorphously perverse? This seems grotesque. Or are we merely to be amused by the image of two children kissing like adults, as we would be amused by a photograph of rabbits dressed up as soldiers, little rifles sticking above their ears?
Like so many works shaped by postmodernism, Mann’s Immediate Family illustrates the triumph of the conceptual over the factual, the fictional construct over the document. The notion behind such a contemporary preference is that reality, as given, is imprisoned within stale perceptual habits. The objective is, of course, liberation. Unfortunately, Mann deconstructs childhood only to liberate her children into adulthood, which is no liberation at all — especially since her version of adulthood turns out to be the cool and erotic and profoundly disenchanted world of the modeling agency. That’s why Immediate Family feels so thin: Mann, loaded down with heavy equipment, is looking for her children in all the wrong places.
This essay previously appeared in The Independent.
— Ed.
