On a broiling June day in western Virginia, Sally Mann told me how she brought her dead dog back to life.
“He died on the trail,” she explained. She knew that Comfit, one of her Belgian Malinois, had breathing issues, but not fatal ones. “I picked him up and carried him to the riverbank, slid him down the riverbank into the water, hauled him into a little spit of land, and I just started beating him. And that’s when he took a breath.”
She shook her head in astonishment, smiling. Her steel-wool-colored ponytail bounced as she climbed the hill that encircles her house. “His tongue had gone pitch black. If I had been a real photographer, I would have shot that tongue all covered in sand.”
Mann has an old-world bluntness about mortality. It is why her photographs command: Her portraits of human corpses and Civil War fields, close-ups of her husband’s advancing muscular dystrophy, the intimations of adulthood in the faces of her young models.
It is also why we read her. A writer of prodigious talent and commitment to the mot juste, Mann, 74, is now publishing her second memoir, “Art Work: On the Creative Life,” a front-porch chatty reminiscence for artists and writers seeking their footing, by “an old woman,” Mann writes, “close to handing in my dinner pail.” (Never mind that she rows every morning and kept a lead on me, her junior by two generations, as we roamed some of her 750 acres, which are criss-crossed by trails that she clears with her farmhand, Elvis. Nerves run through her like a ground current.)
Mann, who is most acclaimed — and criticized — for her otherworldly photos from the late 1980s of her young children, organized “Art Work” according to themes she has found essential to her career: themes like ritual, rejection, poverty and ruthless self-editing.
And error. Three weeks earlier, in her home darkroom, Mann had accidentally achieved solarization, a forcefield-like effect popularized by Man Ray and the Surrealists by purposely introducing light into a developing print or negative.
“I got tired of developing the negative because it was taking too long, so I started reading the news on my phone,” she recalled in her studio. She handed me the resulting print: a silvery river-scape slightly lunar looking, alien. “I think it was the light from the phone that did it. But I don’t know for sure, and now I have to find out.”
In the darkroom, swaying at her countertop of chemical baths, she monitored the three negatives that we had pulled at dusk the evening before on a bank of the Maury River, with her antique eight-by-10 Deardorff, a wooden box that she arm-cradled through the woods like a case of beer.
This particular film she can develop under a dim green safelight rather than in pitch black, so that she can decide by the emerging details when a negative feels done. As the first print sat in the developer, she waved her iPhone above it like a wand. “I’m scientific but also loosey-goosey,” she explained. After half an hour, a dim V-shape appeared in one negative. “Is that solarized?” she asked, scrutinizing it. “That incandescent crumb there?”
At dinner that night, with her husband of 55 years, Larry Mann, a generous Virginia lawyer with a soft Clint Eastwood squint, the couple had futurity on the mind. Will she start a foundation? Where will her papers go? Will the Texas incident dictate that choice?
The incident: In January, the Texas police entered a group exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth that featured Mann, and they seized several photos from the “Immediate Family” series — her landmark monograph of their three preadolescent children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia — in which the children appear nude. (None is more graphic than your average Christ child of the Italian Renaissance.) The police were prepared to bring charges of child pornography against the museum, even sending officers on a (broadly discredited) investigation of art museums in New York, according to the Fort Worth Report. A grand jury declined to bring it to trial, and Mann’s photos were later returned to Gagosian, her gallery. But to the artist and many journalists, the seizure seemed to bring a belated, QAnon-era fruition to the allegations of child exploitation that Mann has weathered since unveiling the photos in the 1990s. (The museum declined to comment for this article.)
She let out a teenage “ugh,” pawing her cheek. “I’d basically stopped showing those photos 25 years ago,” she said. “I’d stopped selling them, allowing them to be reproduced.” Comfit sneezed.
Sharayah Colter, a representative of the Christian advocacy group that first called for the photographs’ removal, last December, explained by phone that “any reasonable understanding” of the seized photos, which included Mann’s daughter sprawled nude on a wet-stained bed, and Mann’s young son frontally unclothed, would find them “undeniably sexualized.”
Colter added: “The world is continually degrading, and it’s showing our human fallenness and our sin, and that bears itself out in culture. The museum exhibit is probably indicative of that.”
Duncan Hosie, an academic fellow at Stanford Law who recently wrote a law review of the case, said by phone that the seizure was a “kind of unfathomable” infringement of the First Amendment. Because the Fort Worth group show also depicted homosexual and nonnuclear notions of family, Hosie sees the seizure as “deeply connected” to the Trump administration’s overhaul of perceived liberal culture in federal museums.
“The very fact that artwork was physically confiscated from a museum,” Hosie said, “is itself likely to deter fulsome artistic expression in Tarrant County and beyond, including artwork that has nothing to do with child nudity.”
During dessert, Mann fixed her eyes on me. “You young people,” she said, “I see you with your happy innocent faces and this absolute avalanche coming down on you.” She shook her head. Facing this renewed moral panic, too, are the Manns’ five young grandchildren, to whom Sally is Granny Go-Go. “That’s my life now,” she said, beaming. “I guess until I’m Granny No-Go.”
Next year, Gagosian will debut “Marital Trust,” her devotional portraits of Larry from the 1990s to the early 2000s, before his muscular dystrophy began to wreak its most visible effects. (Though he still mows the grounds and hand-grinds the kibble that Comfit must consume in liquid form, Larry uses an electric wheelchair.)
In her studio the next day, she flipped through a stack of new prints. Some are confessional. “My Big Ass,” shot with a pneumatic shutter release, is a close-up of Mann unseating herself from Larry’s naked lap, semen scattered across her thigh. Others seem to taunt us with the heterosexual female gaze: Larry as an odalisque, or bathing under a garden hose, the cone of mist enshrouding his body in an aura.
Still Trying and Erring, and Persevering
The exquisite printing betrays her 1970s apprenticeship to the landscapist Ansel Adams. A typical schedule of exposures, dodges and burns in a Mann print can sometimes take a week to rehearse. At her enlarger she entered Zen mode, scrubbing the light like a turntable D.J. to bring out a clump of sticks, half submerged and ghostly, in the river print. But nothing solarized. “Well,” she said, salting her sentence with an expletive, as she often does.
Mann has since emailed me successes: downright igneous photos of the Maury, like rushing mercury. But as she waited in the dark developing the next exposure, she returned to a subject we’d been discussing: her son, Emmett, the male child in the “Immediate Family” photos, who had schizophrenia and who died by suicide in 2016, at age 36. “Art Work” is dedicated to him.
Emmett’s death is one of the scars you can almost feel in the stoicism of “Art Work.” Another is Mann’s decision to censor herself. From 2004 to 2018, hoping to repair the knowledge gap of her segregated Virginia childhood, she shot Black male models, some of them shirtless, often in close-ups. In her 2015 memoir, “Hold Still,” she describes her collaboration with these models and the epiphanies it brought. She printed some in that book and planned to include them in her 2018 retrospective at the National Gallery of Art.
Then Dana Schutz, a white painter, exhibited a likeness of Emmett Till’s body at the Whitney Biennial, and public scorn ensued. Mann and the curators got cold feet. They pulled 13 of the shots, leaving four at the National Gallery. In “Art Work” she weighs the possibility that “I was telling the wrong story,” and she is keeping them out of a planned 2027 survey of her work at various venues, which will stop in Asia and South America.
Can one grieve work? In her attic, Mann stared at a stack of the 150 unexhibited “Black Men” prints, wrapped in opaque plastic. Downstairs, we clicked through scans of them: forearms, backs, hands folded, prayerlike. A photograph is two things, Roland Barthes said: what it says to the world and what it says to you. Mann has found herself hounded by that first way of seeing. As artworks, Mann’s “Black Men” are sumptuous studies of the male body which revel in the quirks of wet-plate collodion, an antique photographic process. But without the story behind them, the context, they could seem nameless abstractions.
“Either the ‘Black Men’ or the pictures of the children,” Mann said, “I just didn’t see that it should be so big a deal. But you know, I’m acclimated now to the cultural gestalt, the moment, whatever the word is. I don’t agree with it, but I get it. Whereas before I didn’t even get it.”
Self-censorship is a bipartisan objective, Hosie, the law scholar, explained. “Because of the Trump administration, it’s easy to think of chilling effects to curation as exclusively coming from the right. I don’t think that’s true.”
One of the prints seized in Texas was “The Perfect Tomato” (1990). It is a picture of her daughter Jessie, at 9, taking a ballerina step — naked — onto a table from the deck railing of the Manns’ river cabin. It is also a supernatural window: onto limelights and thresholds, public realms and private, this life and the next. It builds upon the monumental presence of early expressionist photography — the schools of Edward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz — but with a maternal devotion that is without precedent in the medium.
That cabin is now half-rotten. At dusk one evening Sally poked around the deck. “The ’85 flood was over the roof,” she said, craning her neck. Her father and brothers built it in the 1960s. “The next flood will take it,” she said as she righted one of the plastic chairs around the table where Jessie took that iconic step, and sat. The fireflies tinkled.
“Not anyone could have taken those pictures,” she started. “You need a unique set of circumstances, and I don’t know that they’re duplicable in other people’s lives.” She holds that the modeling sessions were collaborations with consenting and sophisticated children.
The light had gone from blue to gray. “I don’t think I want to show them all that much anymore,” she decided. “It’s so long ago and it just seems so unnecessary, and irrelevant really to my artistic life now.” She paused, then nodded. “But I think they’re important pictures. Everybody has their own little brick that they put in the edifice.”
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