PHOTO:Sally Mann-A Selection

Sally Mann’s rich and varied career as a photographer has seen her focus on architecture, landscape and still life, but she is known above all for her intimate portraits of her family, and in particular her young children. Her work has attracted controversy at times, but it has always been influential, and since her the time of her first solo exhibition, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., in 1977, she has attracted a wide audience.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

A selection of Sally Mann’s photographs from the series: “Deep South”, “Battlefields” and “Proud Flesh” are on presentation at her solo exhibition “A Selection” at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles. Sally Mann has documented her native Virginia for more than 30 years. In her series “Deep South”, she metaphorically transposes histories of the American South into photographs using the wet-plate collodion process. The laborious technique, which dates to the American Civil War, requires the photographer to bring a bulky view camera, glass negatives, and a makeshift darkroom wherever she goes. The process requires great technical skill and is prone to accident. Rather than attempt conventional perfection, Mann embraces scrapes and fogged negatives that enhance a melancholic quality in her images. The outdated chemical process makes material the permanent impression of history on backcountry southern landscapes. Works such as the “Untitled (Emmett Till River Bank)” (1998), are both completely in and of their environment: eerily quiet roads, ruins, and riverbanks that were the sites of both ordinary life and unspeakable violence. In 2001, Sally Mann began the series “Battlefields” that focused on how the landscape is haunted with the memory of war. Her travels brought her to many of the Civil War battlefields, where she documented the various sites on which heavy losses occurred. Due to the photographic process and her aesthetic intent, the landscapes appear darkly mysterious, somber and often difficult to identify, enigmas that viewers must interpret for themselves. Mann describes her role as a witness to these battlefield sites and queries “Do these fields, upon which unspeakable carnage occurred, where unknowable numbers of bodies are buried, bear witness in some way?” Between 2003 and 2009, Mann photographed her husband, Larry, whom she married in 1970. Reminiscent of classical studies of the human form and of early photography, the images of his body in “Proud Flesh” suggest the bond between a husband and wife, but speak as well to human frailty and vulnerability, to the transformative mysteries of aging, the strange lucidity of human flesh, and its transient nature.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, Duration: 15/11-15/12/18, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com