During the q&a following a talk on censorship I gave at Guild Hall in East Hampton this past July, I found myself confronting a monologist deeply upset at the news that Sally Mann had turned from photographing her family -- as she had done for years, in an ongoing series of images that had brought her much acclaim -- to working with the landscape, according to the announcement of her then-forthcoming fall show. Was this the result of censorship or self-censorship, my interrogator wanted to know, and what could those of us who loved those family pictures and wanted more of them do about it, and how could she?
I found (made, actually) an opening in the verbal cascade and essayed a useful response, in which the prior case of Emmet Gowin came up. Back in the late '60s and early '70s Gowin began showing a work-in-progress comparable in many ways to Mann's -- thoughtful, lyrical large- format images of his wife, children and extended circle of relatives -- that quickly became a lot of people's surrogate-family album, many of us eagerly awaiting each new installment. Then, without concluding or resolving in any way, it simply stopped. Gowin turned his attention elsewhere -- to landscape, as it happens, even to aerial photography -- and went on to make perfectly respectable pictures about which I've heard no one speak passionately. I've never been in a discussion of his work since then that did not turn rapidly to expressions of regret that, for whatever reasons, the supply of those family images ran out.
Coincidentally, in mid-September I found myself at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, giving a keynote address to the Southeast Regional Conference of the Society for Photographic Education. In attendance, among others, was Elijah Gowin, one of Gowinâs offspring. I'd known him (through his father's pictures, of course) since infancy, had seen him running around in diapers and out of focus on the summer lawn, and now there he stood sharply defined and fully grown -- rail-thin, tall, soft-spoken, articulate, and a photographer and teacher in his own right. Which verified for me what I'd told my tormentor in the Hamptons: sometimes an artist exhausts a certain subject, sometimes it exhausts itself, and sometimes, regardless of critical success and audience approval, it's simply time for a change -- not always for the better, but necessary nonetheless. As Miles Davis explained to Herbie Hancock, "You know why I had to stop playing those ballads? Because I loved playing them so much."
Today, of course, it's almost impossible for an artist to make such a change away from the omnipresent public eye. Profound transformation of the sort that serious artistic growth sometimes requires often takes place most effectively in private; the self-consciousness and desire for approval that infects almost all public performance has an inhibiting effect on real metamorphosis. Rarely nowadays do we get to see an artist switch subjects, and styles, dramatically, publicly, confidently -- and successfully. So it is both a pleasure and a surprise to walk into "Mother Land: Recent Landscapes of Georgia and Virginia," Mann's current show of recent work at the new Edwynn Houk Gallery, and find it full of marvelous, unexpected, unpredictable pictures in which this photographer pushes -- and, I'd propose, pushes right through -- the envelope of her previous body of work.
Till now, as noted above, Mann's reputation has rested on her consistent address to the subject of childhood and early adolescence, particularly that of young girls, with the emphasis on her own offspring, two girls and a boy, who've served as her primary models for the imagery she's exhibited over the past decade. Superbly crafted as sumptuous, interpretive photographic prints in the classic tradition, they're also consistently and extraordinarily affecting as images: intimate, startling, deeply emotional, devoid of sentiment, psychologically charged, often unsettling, revelatory. Intersecting as they have a time of hysteria over the representation of children's bodies and children's sexuality, they've stirred no small controversy (though no prosecution), and have attracted a wide audience who would be perfectly happy to have Mann continue to make such pictures for the rest of her life.
Has she simply stopped doing so? We will see. Mann has taken enough flak for her work that I can't imagine fear of the thought police driving her away from what matters to her. The children, of course, are growing up, so -- like Gowin's -- they won't always be around for her to work with in any case. Too, they themselves may have had some say in the matter. Beyond that, the subject and style of those photographs -- and their popularity -- could easily become a trap for the photographer, and as an attendant to her own oeuvre Mann strikes me as astute and alert enough to smell that coming. Whatever the reasons, she has now stepped past, or at least aside from, the expectations of others, in a way that tells us something important about what she expects from herself.
What Mann offers here instead is work quite different from what came before: two nine-print suites of landscapes from two different southern states, each state treated as a distinct subject, addressed with a different vision and rendered in a different printmaking style. Neither set manifests the recognizable marks of what by now we know as her "signature style"; these are not her usual pictures minus the kids. The Virginia images, all 30x38 inches, are deep and dark, their spaces sometimes somber but never fearsome, always welcoming, aglow with soft and fragile light, often slightly out of focus, as if perceived and moved through by a sleepwalker. They propose a lambency to the land itself, a melancholy but affectionate emanation of inner luminosity from the very soil.
The Georgia pictures, by contrast, look blasted and bleak, as if registered through the eyes of someone shell- shocked. These much lighter prints are even larger -- 38.5x48.5 inches -- and have been floated within their frames, which draws attention to their nature as objects, as works on paper. And almost all these images give evidence of damage, sometimes severe, to the emulsion of the negative. (Mann indicates that, for these, she'd used a lens she favors that lets in so much light that to compensate she had to use Ortho film, which is prone to certain accidents in the developing process.) The photographer has allowed this chance element into the work, has in fact made it an integral component of the work, the prints so large that these aleatory effects become foregrounded.
One consequence of these choices is that the viewer's awareness of the physical surface of the print and the illusionistic nature of the depth of space in the imagery is intensified. Another is to make the images feel archaic, almost like a group of found Civil War-era negatives lovingly and carefully printed, damage unapologetically presented as an aspect of the surviving material. These are beautiful in a much different way, blank white stretches set off with faint, delicate traceries of trees and hills, somehow almost Oriental in their spareness and economy of gesture. Unlike the Virginia suite, these pictures contain traces of human presence: a road, a path, a scattering of cut logs, a garden wall, a row of telephone poles, even an electrical power plant. Yet the anachronistic tension between the last-named structure and the ancient feel of the image in which it's embedded works well, as if some time-displaced, combat-stunned Southern vet had just today awakened in a battlefield hospital and peered outside the tent.
This inquiry into the South has not been undertaken casually. Mann was born in a house that once belonged to Stonewall Jackson. A quarter-century ago, when she was beginning her work in the medium, she found and preserved 10,000 negatives by Michael Miley, best known as Robert E. Lee's portraitist. She has steeped herself in the history of the South, and in effect dedicates this exhibit to the South as both place and state of mind, and identifies the Civil War as its underlying issue, by using as its only wall text a quote from Shelby Foote's novel, Shiloh.
As her own motherland, and that of her children, the South forms both the physical and the social context from which her work springs. What she has to tell us about it cannot help but enrich our sense of her total body of work, including those family images so cherished by so many. Nor does it speak only to issues of the past, or of that particular terrain and its inhabitants. Its resonances -- including the unresolved issues of the Civil War itself -- remain with us everywhere, as I was reminded when, awaiting the press print whose reproduction accompanies this commentary, I watched a middle-aged black woman in a housekeeper's uniform vacuum the carpet of the gallery's back room. I think that those of her admirers who elect to accompany Mann on her new venture into this uncharted territory will not regret that decision.
