Sally Mann has played a leading role in contemporary photography in America for over 30 years. Her career matured during the American “Culture Wars” of the 1990s, when photographs of her children became embroiled in national debates about family values and exploitation.
Mann is one of the most noted experts in the obsolete wet-plate collodion process, and one of the first photographic artists to revitalise this process in the late 90s, sparking a neo-romantic revival of antiquated darkroom processes such as tintypes, ambrotypes and daguerreotypes within the photographic community. This photographic technique from the 19th century, in a contemporary context, is used not for its efficiency and accuracy, but for its high incidence of imperfection that creates ethereal, bright and over-exposed or dark and muted under-exposed tones that arouse the sense of memory and nostalgia prevalent in Sally Mann’s extensive body of work.[1]
In “Proud Flesh”, Mann revisits this technique, turning her lens to the body as a principle subject once more after a decade of photographing the American southern landscapes in her homeland of Virginia. In this series, Mann’s husband Larry steps into the frame, concluding the cycle of Mann’s family-orientated portraits that deal with themes of youth, vitality and burgeoning adulthood, now punctuated with images of aging, death and the transient, material state of the human body.
Her photograph of her husband Larry entitled Hephaestus (2008); the Greek god of the forge, from the series “Proud Flesh” is an example of Mann’s characteristic aesthetic. Mann makes precise compositional decisions as designated by the use of a hundred year old 8x10 bellows camera[2] in which she is bound by the limitations of the frame. She closes in on her husband’s naked body, obscuring his face from sight, a commonality between the photos in the series, suggesting that the subject of her image is not bound by personality or identity, rather is representational embodiment of human physicality in the spirit of Rodin or Michelangelo’s’ references to the classical gods. The tight framing of Larry’s torso, poised with one hand clenched tight against a table that causes the muscles of the arm to be accentuated by protruding veins, as the other hand steadies the form, evoking an abstracted interpretation of the subject, zoning in on the body as decaying material rather than vessel, highlighting a distortion of self-image during the aging process. The high contrast of tones in the image is both an artefact of the antiquated process, and of later darkroom techniques used post-processing on warm-toned, black and white silver gelatine paper.
Mann creates her own negative emulsion on glass using collodion, deliberately introducing impurities such as sand and grease. She coats the glass unevenly, letting the emulsion pool at the edges, encouraging a varied exposure across the image captured in camera. The result in Hephaestus is a photographic anomaly that carves the subjects torso down the middle, highlighting one side of the body but obscuring sex and muscle tone in the darkened areas of the frame. Natural broad lighting, which one discerns is shining through an open window in the couples’ Virginian home outside of the frame, highlights this muscular distortion in the arm, but still the subject stands erect, poised for the continuation of a courage and vitality within the impermanent.
Larry’s diagnosis of muscular dystrophy influenced Mann to consider her husband as the main subject of “Proud Flesh”, centring the series on his body weathering the test of time. In consider the aging process, Sally and her husband create an intimate space in which they decipher their conception of mortality. Referencing the gods and goddesses of Greek antiquity to frame the quiet dignity of man, the photographer weaves a narrative between artist and subject, revealing her intimate conception of her husband as lover and father, a glorified patriarchal archetype through loving, inquisitive eyes. It is clear that the series is a personal unveiling of the inner-workings of their profound and unflinching relationship.
Man explains that the impetus to explore such a subject with a model to whom she is intimately connected, does not make the realisation of this series any less frightening, personally and ethically. She explains “…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. […] At our ages, we are past the prime of life, given to sinew and sag, and Larry bears [all] with his trademark god-like nobility.”[3]
Having already been embroiled in controversy surrounding the photographic nude many times in her career, Mann tackles the subject of the aging male body with an acutely feminine gaze that to her mind is still an issue rife with polemic dispute. Rather than the typical post-modern feminist focus on the feminine form that seeks to reclaim the right to feminine representation, Mann’s focus on the masculine in this series in an exploit that to her mind is still embroiled in out-dated gender politics.
In Conscientious (2009), she declares with a colourful reflection on Greek mythology, “I am a woman who looks. Within traditional narratives, women who look, especially women who look unflinchingly at men, have been punished. Take poor Psyche, punished for all time for daring to lift the lantern to finally see her lover. 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.”[4]. In Hephaestus, the viewer can discern Mann’s otherworldly gaze from behind the lens that elucidates her relationship with her subject, how she views his naked body in defiance of all natural laws, drawing out the very essence of impermanence in our short lives on the pale blue dot in the cosmos that humanity inhabits.
[1] Wesseling, E. (2011). "Memory is the primary instrument, the inexhaustible nutrient source": Remediations of literary romanticism in sally mann's family photographs. Arcadia, 46(1), 3-14,246.
[2] Ravenal, J. (2010), Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit with Essays by David Levi Strauss and Anne Wilkes Tucker, Aperture and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, p. 12
[3] Colberg, Joerg, Sally Mann: Proud Flesh, Conscientious, Aug 19, 2009 http://jmcolberg.com/weblog/2009/08/sally_mann_proud_flesh/
[4] Colberg, Joerg, op. cit., Aug 19, 2009
Kommentare