sally mann + getting ready to return to uganda

A few days ago I finished reading Hold Still, Sally Mann’s memoir. While so much about which she wrote rang true with me, nothing resonated more than her discussion about the true possibilities of the photographic portrait. While discussing her body of work that consists of portraits of African American men, she had this to say:

“The photographer [holds] all the cards. Exploitation lies at the root of every great portrait, and all of us know it. Even the simplest picture of another person is ethically complex, and the ambitious photographer, no matter how sincere, is compromised right from the git-go… Taking the picture is an invasive act, a one-sided exercise of power…  But at a higher level, which portraiture at its best can achieve, the results can also be transformative expressions of love, affirmation and hope. If transgression is at the very heart of photographic portraiture, then the ideal outcome – beauty, communion, honesty and empathy – mitigates the offense. Art can afford the kindest crucible of association, and within its ardent issue lies a grace that both transcends and tenders understanding.”

I’ve wrestled with the challenges of photographing as an outsider and the notion of so-called (and unfortunately named) “poverty porn” for many years. In 2006, when I first traveled to Uganda, the centerpiece of both my photographic and professional work unwittingly became the children who live at an orphanage in the small village of Kajjansi. As you know, I have spent the last nine years documenting them and helping them change their lives for the better. I am forever inspired by the generosity of spirit these children continue to offer me.

In a few short weeks, I’ll travel to Uganda for the 9th time. In preparation for my journey, I have been revisiting pictures made during the last three trips. Some you may have seen before, but many are being printed for the first time. They are portrayals of just a few of the strong, hopeful dignified people – living in one of the poorest countries in the world - who have enriched me as a photographer and as a human being.

I look forward to the privilege of making more pictures along the red dirt roads of Kajjansi. My hope is that the new pictures, like these, will be imbued with beauty, communion, honesty and empathy, qualities which Mann suggests comprise the ideal outcome of photographic portraiture.

developer trays

I first saw a piece by John Cyr in an exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. I even contacted him to see about possibly buying one. The work is so lovely - in a haunting, sad kind of way. And it is so familiar. Looking at these images conjures up distinct smells and a taste on my tongue that only used to happen when I was working in the darkroom. Cyr's project was featured on Featureshoot.com yesterday. I've included some of my favorites below.

“As analog photography becomes less popular, John Cyr’s ‘Developer Trays’ read like a love poem to the vanishing medium. For the haunting series, he catalogues the empty developer trays of prolific and renowned photographers, each bearing the marks and stains of chemicals, which emerge like secret data points recording every serendipitous accident of the darkroom.

Through the course of the project, Cyr shot eighty-two trays, contacting photographers, institutions, and estates that held them in their possession. After cultivating a wide network of artists and studios, he turned to more obscure sources, like the relatives or former assistants of deceased photographers. Some photographers sent their developer trays in the mail to be photographed. For this labor of love, Cyr made himself available to travel at a moment’s notice; to view Sally Mann’s tray for example, he drove twelve hours to her Virginia home two days after she responded to his request. To Cyr’s dismay, many established and working photographers no longer had darkrooms and therefore no developer trays.

As small rectangular frames set against a black backdrop, the empty trays themselves begin resemble worn photographic prints, etched with the indexical marks of time and use. Removed from the hallowed darkroom space, the trays are at last exposed to bright light, examined as personal and historical artifacts. With a clear and forensic gaze, Cyr captures each object with the same degree of reverence, allowing the simple elegance the thing itself to stand in for concrete or absolute meanings. Like a wistful archivist, he meticulously records the evidence of that which cannot be chronicled, the intimate and tactile process itself. In these metal and plastic containers, material and image were born of nothingness, taking shape over the agitated surfaces of prints. Seeing them now, entirely vacated, we half expect one final ghostly vision to emerge before our

eyes.”

- Featureshoot.com

sally mann

Having just seen the Art:21 segment featuring Sally Mann and learning of her latest book The Flesh and the Spirit (due in November) I revisited her work from (gulp) 20 years ago. It's mind boggling to think about how many photographers (myself included) she has influenced.

I'm sure many of you know all about Mann, but I'm going to include the bio from her gallery, Gagosian, anyway. I'm also throwing in a couple quotes and some of my favorite pictures. I think most, if not all these images, are from Immediate Family (published in 1992).

"Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia in 1951. She has always remained close to her roots. She has photographed in the American South since the 1970s, producing series on portraiture, architecture, landscape and still life. She is perhaps best known for her intimate portraits of her family, her young children and her husband, and for her evocative and resonant landscape work in the American South. . 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.

Sally Mann explored various genres as she was maturing in the 1970s: she produced landscapes and architectural photography, and she blended still life with elements of portraiture. But she truly found her metier with her second publication, a study of girlhood entitled At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women (1988). Between 1984 and 1994, she worked on the series, Immediate Family (1992), which focuses on her three children, who were then all aged under ten. While the series touches on ordinary moments in their daily lives – playing, sleeping, eating – it also speaks to larger themes such as death and cultural perceptions of sexuality. In her most recent series, Proud Flesh, taken over a six year interval, Mann turns the camera onto her husband, Larry. The resultant photographs are candid and frank portraits of a man at his most vulnerable moments.

Mann has produced two major series of landscapes: Deep South (Bullfinch Press, 2005) and Mother Land. In What Remains (Bullfinch Press, 2003), she assembled a five-part study of mortality, one which ranges from pictures of the decomposing body of her beloved greyhound, to the site where an armed fugitive committed suicide on her property in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. She has often experimented with color photography, but she has remained most interested in black and white, especially photography’s antique technology. She has long used an 8x10 bellows camera, and has explored platinum and bromoil printing processes. In the mid 1990s she began using the wet plate collodion process to produce pictures which almost seem like hybrids of photography, painting, and sculpture.

Sally Mann lives and works in Lexington, Virginia. A Guggenheim fellow, and a three-times recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Mann was named 'America’s Best Photographer' by Time magazine in 2001. She has been the subject of two documentaries: Blood Ties (1994), which was nominated for an Academy Award, and What Remains (2007) which premiered at Sundance and was nominated for an Emmy for Best Documentary in 2008. She has been the subject of major exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Her photographs can be found in many public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art."












"If I could be said to have any kind of aesthetic, it’s sort of a magpie aesthetic- I just go and I pick up whatever is around. If you think about it, the children were there, so I took pictures of my children. It’s not that I’m interested in children that much or photographing them- it’s just that they were there..."








"There is something about this process, and about the whole 8 x 10 [camera] business, that takes it out of the arena of the snapshot, even though, of course, I’m always desperate for that feeling. I wanted those family pictures to look effortless. I wanted them to look like snapshots. And some of them did."

sally mann: "proud flesh"

God, I wish I had written this:

"I can think of numberless males, from Bonnard to Callahan, who have photographed their lovers and spouses, but I am having trouble finding parallel examples among my sister photographers. The act of looking appraisingly at a man, making eye contact on the street, asking to photograph him, studying his body, has always been a brazen venture for a woman, though, for a man, these acts are commonplace, even expected.

I have looked hard at my husband since the first long strides he took into the room where I was languishing on a ratty chenille couch in some student apartment. My eyes fastened on him with bright interest, squinting to better get the measure of this tall man. Within six months, we were married. That was forty years ago, and almost the first thing I did was photograph him.

But that long history of picture-taking didn't make it any easier to make the Proud Flesh photographs. Rhetorically circumnavigate it any way you will, but exploitation lies at the root of every interaction between photographer and subject, even forty years into it. Larry and I both understand how ethically complex and potent the act of making photographs is, how freighted with issues of honesty, responsibility, power, and complicity, and how so many good images come at the expense of the sitter, in one way or another. These new images, we both knew, would come at his.

It is a testament to Larry's tremendous dignity and strength that he allowed me to take the pictures that I did. The gods might reasonably have slapped this particular lantern out of my raised hand, for before me lay a man as naked and vulnerable as any wretch strung across the mythical, vulture-topped rock. At our ages, we are past the prime of life, given to sinew and sag, and Larry bears, with his trademark god-like nobility, the further affliction of a late-onset muscular dystrophy. That he was so willing is both heartbreaking and terrifying at once.

Most of the pictures I take are of the things I love, the things that fascinate and compel me, but that doesn't mean they are easy to look at or take…

I look, all the time, at the people and places I care about, and I look with both ardor and frank, aesthetic, cold appraisal. And I look with the passions of both eye and heart, but in that ardent heart, there must also be a splinter of ice.

And so it was with fire and ice, the studio woodstove too far away from the light to do him any good on a cold winter afternoon, that Larry and I began this work of exploring what it means to grow older, to let the sunshine fall voluptuously on a still-beautiful form, and to spend quiet afternoons together again. No phone, no kids, two fingers of bourbon, the smell of the ether, the two of us--still in love, still at work."

- Sally Mann