Sally Mann- Brian Dove

The Sally Mann exhibit at the VMFA was one of the most impressive shows I have seen. A lot of artwork is infinitely more impressive when viewed in person and Mann’s prints definitely fall into that category. The Body Farm series was uncomfortable to look at. These photographs of decomposing bodies bring about a sense of hollow loneliness that is different from the kind of loneliness a living being feels. Maybe this is influenced by my own views of death and the afterlife.

Another thing that impacted me was Mann’s series of self-portraits. In the video documentary that played at the end of the exhibit, Sally Mann speaks about how she is a very restless person and doing these six-minute exposure self-portraits becomes almost therapeutic for her. When viewing Mann’s self-portraits, one can definitely begin to feel a cornucopia of emotions in her facial expressions.

Sally Mann

As I see with others this is one of my favorite images. The exhibit "Matter Lent" was done in 2000-01. The color prints were printed in 2010. The enlargements were made from 8x10 collodion wet-plate negatives. She photographed this series after the Civil War battlefield images were made. After unearthing and photographing the remains of a family dog she was inspired to do this series. Mann visited the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Center a.k.a. The Body Farm. A few of these exist, it's a place where unclaimed and donated bodies are left to rot for scientific study. With the mix of rotting and decaying flesh and with the collodion wet-plate process technique often echoing the process of physical decay it worked well together. The black and white images mute out thoughts that the color prints show, like the colors of the bodies and the surroundings. I wasn't expecting to turn the corner and see color on the walls in contrast to most of her other images. They hit me in a way different way then the black and white images.

As for the rest of her show I really didn't particularly care for. I've always liked Sally Mann but I walked pretty fast through her show until I got to "Matter Lent" then I actually spent some time with the photos in that area of the show.

Sally Mann

The image above is one of my favorites of the work at the Sally Mann exhibit. I love the fact that is actually a long exposure of maggots eating the flesh of this deceased individual. I really like the anonymity- you can't tell whether it is a man or a woman. I think that the fact that she used glass plates was amazing. I remember going to the bodies exhibit at the Science Center in Orlando. There were over 200 deceseased bodies dissected and analyzed within the show. It was an amazing experience and reached me as much as this photograh above.

As for the rest of the show, I wasn't thoroughly impressed. I thought that the overall the show lacked that extra bit- the extra piece that ties each of the shows together. I feel that Sally Mann knows how to take pictures and she has amazing ideas, she just doesn't know how to execute each idea to it's fullest potential. Like for the portraits of her children all grown up, they weren't that interesting. They seemed like simple portraits and that's all. Besides that, I will continue to go see her shows because it might have just been a fluke that I didn't like it.

Sally Man - The Flesh and The Spirit

Sally Mann, "Hephaestus," 2008. Gelatin silver print, 15 x 13 1/2 inches

Sally Mann, "Was Ever Love," 2009. Gelatin silver print, 15 x 13 1/2 inches

These were two of my favorite pictures from her series Proud Flesh. This series is particularly powerful, especially these two images, because they deal with the emotional weight and the physical suffering that families endure when someone has a degenerative disease, like muscular dystrophy. The emotional turmoil associated with these images makes them very intimate in a sad and strange way. This series became even more interesting to me once I watched her movie and I heard her say that young photographers should take pictures of things and people that matter to them or they won't make good art and even more so when she said that Larry (her husband) was always willingly to model for her (even with his poor health) and she wasn't sure if it was right to ask him to do so. The vulnerability, affection, and the fragility of life that this series addresses makes these images very powerful and very easy to connect with emotionally.

Detail, Untitled (Self-Portraits)

Ambrotype (unique collodion wet-plate positive on black glass), with sandarac varnish. (15 x 13 ½ in.)

Untitled (What Remains)

Gelatin silver print, 15 x 13 ½ in.

Mortality both scares and interests me, so I really enjoyed Mann's What Remains and Self Portraits because they depict her emotional struggle and fascination with mortality. I feel that Sally Mann has successfully taken the exploration of the vulnerable and fragile state of the human life and body to a level that other artists have failed to achieve. I was also interested in her process, specifically how she used the collodion wet plate process. Mann used the word 'serendipitous' to describe it, because the 'errors' of her negatives made her prints more beautiful and interesting. In the movie, she talked about how fragile the negatives were and how easily they acquired scratches and dust. I felt that the fragility of the process had interesting (and possibly intentional) connections to her focus on mortality. I also thought it was interesting that she hoped she never mastered the process; that these errors only add to the aesthetic of her work.
I also thought it was good planning on her part to include the biographical video at the end of the show because it really made me appreciate and relate to her photos and her struggle a lot more than had I only viewed her photos and read her artist statements. This was a great show and I plan on returning for a longer visit.

Sally Mann
Untitled#7
from the series "Antietam"
2000
gelatin silver print with varnish

Going to the Sally Mann exhibit really opened up my perspective on the kind of stories that documentary/narrative photography could have. I also really appreciated that the museum decided to include some of her early work with her children that made her popular. I thought the study on decomposing bodies was very interesting, as well as the study of her husband after he was diagnosed with his muscle condition. However the work that really interested me was the battle filed series she did in Antietam. This series originated from her witnessing a murder in her own backyard by the police killing a fugitive. She observed the area were the man died and became very interested in documenting landscapes where mass murders occurred. This eventually lead to her series on decomposing bodies.

Alexis Mattila- Sally Mann

I went into Sally Mann's exhibit with fairly little knowledge about her or her work, so I really didn't know what to expect. Prior to the show, I'd seen some of her images and I knew her for being fairly controversial with the subjects she chooses to photograph (ie, her children), so being able to go in and experience the work for myself was an extremely rewarding and enlightening experience.

That being said, I really enjoyed the exhibit. As a series, the body farm images were the most interesting to me. So many artists hold a certain fascination with death; striving to capture the essence of death, the mood of death, the emotions, colors, movements or sounds...well, whatever it is, it's usually represented or portrayed in some conceptual or staged way. But this was the first series of work that I've seen that is literally of death. They were real corpses, actual human remains. Many of the images seemed rather dreamlike, but I couldn't decide if it was a surreal, floating dreamy or a haunting, foreboding dreamy. I think I bounced back and forth between seeing them as both. It was rather intriguing, wondering why Sally Mann chose to go shoot actual corpses. I wonder if she was trying to make some kind of statement about death, or show that even capturing the essence of death cannot create a stronger vision than an image of death itself. I'm curious about if that's true.

Something else that I found interesting:

When I saw this piece in the exhibit (left), I immediately thought of Christian Boltanski's work (right). They're not super similar, but i suppose the two kind of give me similar feelings when looking at them; how they both seem to create this essence of longing a lost identity or the faces from a distant memory, forever captured in our minds as nothing more than blurry faces that are remembered for being forgotten.
(image on right: Monument Canada, 1988, by Christian Boltanski)

Mel Kobran- Sally Mann Exhibit

In Sally Mann’s exhibit, “The Flesh and The Spirit,” I was really interested in her utilization of many different types of photographs that still functioned to create a show that had a cohesive theme and sense of chronology.

This photo (Untitled) of the decomposing face is one of my favorites of the exhibit. The long exposure needed to produce the image allows the motion blur of the maggots on the face to create an ephemeral haze that makes what is an upsetting and gruesome subject very dreamlike and surreal. This quality is enhanced by the strong contrast in the photo that highlights the decomposing nature of the corpse, but in such a way that increases my fascination rather than my disgust. For similar reasons, the first image of the corpse’s full body really stood out to me. The quality of light in Sally Mann’s photos has this remarkable quality of being stark yet translucently delicate simultaneously. It is this hazy nature, in combination with the imperfections in he large format processing and printing, which make her work so impressive.