ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 21, 1996 TAG: 9604190067
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
AFTER all the uproar, death was a relief for Sally Mann.
CHANGING HER IMAGES ONCE CONTROVERSIAL FOR PHOTOGRAPHS OF HER OCCASIONALLY NAKED CHILDREN, SALLY
MANN HAS A NEW OBSESSION
For Mann - whose earlier photographs earned her money, fame and bile in more or less equal portions - the "Hospice" exhibit has brought something else again: unqualified praise.
The Washington Post, for one, labeled all the "Hospice" photos "gifts" - adding of Mann's work in particular, "her photographs invite us to flow into their [the patients'] minds."
The New York Times, meanwhile, said the long captions Mann wrote to accompany her photographs "rend the heart."
So how is publicity without controversy?
"It's great," Mann said.
She is 44, wispy of build, slightly nervous and one of the most admired art photographers of her age.
She is also one of the more controversial. "Immediate Family," title of a traveling exhibit and 1992 photo book, both cemented her international reputation and reportedly made her a millionaire.
It also led some viewers to question her upbringing, her morals, even her maternal instincts:
"Motherhood should not give license to activities that are morally wrong," wrote an early reviewer of the evolving "Family" photos, in the San Diego Tribune in 1989. "Nor should art."
```Immediate Family' really hit a nerve. I really just dropped out of sight for a while. I just disappeared from the radar screen. I don't know how people stand it," she said of the media spotlight.
Mann is in the news again.
But those who only know her by the controversial photos of her three children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia - or even by the earlier work "At Twelve," about girls on the brink of adolescence - are in for a surprise.
Mann confessed to her editor in 1994 that her children were "receding into the landscape" in her photographs.
The salient fact about Mann's photographs for "Hospice" is that they contain no people at all.
Instead, Mann aimed her 8x10 Phillips camera at objects within the dying patient's ken: two pairs of frozen heart-shaped underwear; a luminous pot; a close-up of a bear's gaping mouth.
Mann is the first to admit that landscapes are merely safer.
That portraiture, whatever its power as art, carries dangerous freight:
That there are lives involved here.
"That's the thing you have to ask yourself, if you make a good piece of art - what price is too high?'' said Mann, who wondered in the self-questioning that followed "Immediate Family" if all portraits were, at bottom, exploitation.
Even now, "I'm kind of dubious about it," she said of making portraits.
No portraits of the dying
This is a new Sally Mann, older of course, wiser perhaps, and slightly gun-shy.
Call her portrait-shy.
In fact, Mann has come full circle from her early work, when she often photographed the stunning, empty mountain landscape around her native Rockbridge County.
But there is a difference.
"Who does it make you think of?'' asked Mann, standing in the upstairs gallery of her home beside the Washington and Lee University campus.
She held up a grainy print of a trodden-down ochre landscape that calls to mind the grim Civil War images of Mathew Brady. When a visitor remarked that the squat evergreens on the background hill look like people from a distance, she was excited:
"Yeah - I see bodies, actually. Down here." She pointed to a valley in the foreground, in which the earth seems torn and tortured, as if by battling men.
This, then, is a portrait of the dead, in which inanimate objects must do the talking. Mann leaves it to objects to do the talking in "Hospice," too.
Mann made perhaps a half-dozen trips with Rockbridge County hospice worker Joan Robins while working on the exhibit photos, which she did on commission. Robins had cared for Mann's own father, a Lexington doctor, who died of brain cancer in 1988.
Mann was soon convinced of two things - that Robins was a saint, and that portraits of the dying patients themselves were beyond her. "I just didn't have the whatever it took - the guts - to do it."
Instead, she set out to document the things that were important to the dying person. Soon that plan changed, as well. In the end, "Hospice" is part sentiment, part realism and part folklore - everything but portraits of the dying.
The photographs are accompanied by a text written by Mann - the writings The New York Times reviewer noted "rend the heart."
The growling bear illustrates the story of a lifelong hunter who rose from his deathbed to go on one last hunt.
A nearby photo of a broken bridge across a swollen, glowing stream accompanies the story of a dying man who gave to hospice worker Robins a large, plastic key.
It is the key to the river, he informs her solemnly. If she keeps it, it will bring her peace.
In fact, there is only one portrait in the exhibit, which is also the only photograph in color. It shows Mann's father, lying inert on a sofa in his bathrobe, which is festooned with flowers.
She could not bring herself to shoot his picture when he was ill, Mann said. "This was a man who didn't take kindly to the indignities of dying. Maybe it's a cheap shot - but I finally summoned up the courage after he was dead."
`Immediate Family,' nearby community
She is shy, but hardly timid. And, maybe following in the tradition of her iconoclastic father - a courtly country doctor and avowed atheist with a quirky, obscene sense of humor - she has a nose for trouble.
Not that there has been much recently, she insisted. Asked about the community reaction to "Immediate Family," Mann - perhaps weary from too many days in the darkroom - grumped, "How would I know? I never leave the darkroom. I never leave this house. I love this community, but I never get to see anybody."
"People see her as a normal person," offered Robins, the hospice worker, who dropped by for the interview.
Added Mann:
"I think Lexington kind of likes oddballs."
Before "Immediate Family," Mann photographed local 12-year-old girls, a project that angered some residents for its bleak realism. "At Twelve" includes photos of a young girl sitting in the dirt while a shirtless, beer-bellied man and a woman embrace behind her, and another in which a girl sprawls across the hood of a dirty Volkswagen. On her face is distrust; on the hood is scratched the word "doom."
Said a local college official at the time, "What troubled me was that I saw a lot more of Rockbridge County than I wanted to."
Critics of her next book said about the same of Mann's three kids.
"Immediate Family" seemed to take another, even bolder step into forbidden territory. Mann has said of the photos: "I have seldom shied away from photographing what was before me. ... There are many pictures in which my children are nude or hurt or sick or angry. We are spinning a story, based on truth but embracing fiction, of what it is to grow up."
Some found some of the nude photos pointlessly provocative. There is also jarring violence, both real and staged. "Immediate Family" mixes photographs of routine childhood gore - Emmett with blood coagulated on his mouth and chin from an injured nose, Jessie in the hospital emergency room immediately after receiving stitches - as well as the stuff of nightmares.
In one photo, a naked Virginia, all angelic features and brown curls, appears to hang, dead, from a cord about her neck (the picture is in a fact a trompe l'oeil in which the "rope" is a snorkel sticking upright behind the child's head).
Critics - some critics, anyway - were impressed.
"Sally Mann's extraordinary contribution has been to give photographic expression to pathetic truths that have hitherto been the exclusive domain of psychologists and authors of great works of fiction," wrote Janet Malcolm in the New York Review of Books.
Others saw it differently. At least one preacher - in Milwaukee - reportedly tried to drum up opposition to a Mann exhibit, while a Mann profile in The New York Times Magazine brought a hailstorm of written response:
Though the Times letters were almost amazingly balanced between positive and negative - Mann claims they break down 50-50 - the critical ones were cutting:
"Mann is using her children solely for her own benefit," said one letter writer.
"She should re-examine her art and its motivations," wrote another.
And a third:
"Mann's images of children, manipulated to appear sexualized and physically abused, may say more about repressed memories of her own childhood than of her present relationship with her children."
Mann said she did not anticipate such a reaction - in part because she had not anticipated the sales. Photos books usually sell a few thousand copies, she said, while "Immediate Family" sold 42,570.
In any case, "I was surprised people were shocked at the nudity. And they were surprised that I was surprised."
"Americans have such a peculiar sensitivity to it," she said of nudity. "And then I think with that sensitivity comes an inability to make a distinction between nudity and sex."
In any event, the notoriety hardly hurt sales.
"I don't know of any other artist who has hit the scene with such a flash," said Jenni Holder, Mann's representative at Houk Friedman gallery in New York. Holder said they sold some 400 of Mann's prints in the six months following an "Immediate Family" gallery show in 1992. They still sell approximately one Mann print a day, at prices ranging from $1,200 to $5,500.
Those might be considered bargains. "Closed-out" editions - photographs for which no more prints will be made - can fetch several times that amount at auction. A print of a photograph featuring daughter Jessie (clothed) holding a candy cigarette recently sold at auction for $20,000, Holder said.
The children themselves have repeatedly told interviewers they are proud of the photos. A Lexington psychologist, Daniel Shybunko, examined the two older children before "Immediate Family" was released and found them "well-adjusted and self-assured," he told The New York Times.
Emmett is a guarded 16 now, shy of reporters. Virginia, 11, popped in while her mother talked to rifle her desk drawer for chocolates.
Jessie, now a teen-ager taller than her mother, said the photographs of her have had consequences. Classmates sometimes tease her, she said, because they have heard that she is rich.
But she also said the photographs of her, which invariably highlight her ethereal good looks, are a pick-me-up when she is feeling down. "It's something other girls don't have," she said.
She said she has "a perfect life," in which she travels widely and meets many people. At 14, she has been to Italy twice. The Mann children even attended an Academy Awards ceremony in which a documentary about the family was nominated for an award. (It did not win.)
"Every kid - every person - loves attention," said Jessie, left momentarily alone with a reporter while her mother ran an errand. "I think it made us more aware and more mature. I think all three of us are special, because we've had to think about a lot of complex things.
"I'm just really thankful."
`Just another landscape'
Mann began drifting away from portraiture after "Immediate Family" - and not only from fear of exploiting her subjects.
For one thing, when "Immediate Family" was released, her children were approaching puberty - terrain she already had covered in "At Twelve."
"I sort of lost interest" at that point, Mann said. Also "They pull away at that age. They need their privacy ."
In fact, Mann, always restless, had already turned to other subjects. At various other periods in her 25-year career, Mann has focused on landscapes, dream-like photographs of women, platinum prints of isolated swatches of clothing or anatomy; and color montages of assorted unappetizing things. An airport security guard, no doubt to his own dismay, once made Mann unwrap a suspicious-looking foil package. Inside were photo props: cow tongues, fish and decomposing vegetation.
Of her recent landscapes, Mann said: "I'm obsessed. That's all I want to do. They're a visual puzzle to me."
Which is not to say that none of her recent photographs includes people.
One semi-secret project already has sparked interest . An article in an upscale women's magazine, "Mirabella," recently ran an artfully unrevealing but nonetheless nude photo of her husband, Larry, sprawled across a bed.
Other photos show Larry Mann alone, and the two of them making love.
"No one has consistently made the intimate life of their male mate a subject for their art," explained Mann, her sights apparently set on one more taboo. "Maybe because of their historical usage in art, women expect to be objectified. Men don't."
So how does Mann's husband, a Lexington lawyer , feel about this?
"Just another landscape," grinned Larry Mann, who reportedly has been autographing copies of "Mirabella."
"Having the camera around is not a problem," he added. "You get used to it. People have to understand how routine it is."
Routine or not, the fate of the photos has yet to be determined, he said.
LENGTH: Long : 254 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY/Staff. 1. Sally Mann (below) in her darkroomby CNBin her house in Lexington. B&W. 2. Her family, for years her
favorite subject, provides a lap for Sally Mann: (From left)
Daughter Jessie, husband Larry, daughter Virginia and son Emmett in
the living room of their Lexington home. color. 3. A 1988 photograph
of the artist's dead father (right) was included in the "Hospice: A
Photographic Inquiry" exhibit. color. 4. "Emmett, Jessie, and
Virginia, 1989". 5. Now Mann's children are "receding into the
landscape" in her photographs. 6. "Untitled," 1992 gelatin silver
print by Lexington photographer Sally Mann for "Hospice: A
Photographic Inquiry." "What patients see from their windows becomes
vital to them. Hospice workers stress the importance of moving
patients to allow them a view outside.... When they look out,... the
objects in their view [are] random and unaffecting. The old bucket,
the dog sprawled under the eaves, become touchstones, become their
very world." KEYWORDS: PROFILE