Sally Mann

Today, I want to put an essay of mine about a very talented photographer called Sally Mann.

“IMMEDIATE FAMILY”

“Immediate Family” is the name of Sally Mann’s exhibition that has opened in 1992, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Then, she was 41 years old, and was not famous as she is today. Photographs that she exhibited were taken in 1984 to 1991, Virginia, which focused on the childhoods of her own children; Jessie, Virginia and Emmet. However she thought that her images were “little more than tender, maternal photographs of her children” (http://www.americansuburbx.com/), they created a scandal. Controversy to her aims and thoughts, people criticized her photographs as child pornography.

She first discovered her perfect models after one of her children came with a blown up eye to her. She immediately took her photograph as she was, which is a very effective and a unique photograph, because she had caught the moment and her child’s feeling as they are, in a very natural way. Also its softness and putting the model at the center with a close shoot, without any background makes it even more effective. We know that she continued to take her children’s photographs for more than 10 years. She sometimes used their nude bodies, in her shoots, too, which is the reason why people criticized her work as pornography and thought that she was indecent. But, in fact her real goal was to show her children’s real or fictional lives. Mostly her images were from their ordinary lives from a mother’s view point. It is known that every mother sees their children nude, with a blown up eye or with a bloody nose. These are natural things, for me. Also I think that Sally Mann is very courageous to show her own family’s ordinary lives, because people were not used to see these kinds of things, then. For example, nobody wanted to see a nude child, because it was labeled as pornography, but she did not care about everybody; she had the power to change some people’s view points, because the way she looked was vey different and pure.

Belmin Pilevneli

Citation:

Valerie Osbourn “Sally Mann’s Immediate Family- The Un Flinching and Unafraid Chilhood” 27 october 2006

<http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/11/theory-sally-manns-immediate-family.html>

 Sally Mann discovers her litttle models after her daughter comes to her with this kind of a look:)

 Her children: Virginia, Emmet and Jessie

Her daughter.