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| "Untitled
(#1, #30, and #34)," 1998. From the "Deep South" series. Tea-toned
gelatin silver print; 38 x 48 inches each. © Sally Mann. |
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“Deep South”
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At times gothic in their
sensibility, Mann's murky, dark images of Louisiana and Mississippi
have an anthropomorphic quality. One image of a forest floor focuses
on a group of gnarled
roots writhing in a sea of mist. Mann's technique enhances this
hazy view, turning this ordinary plot of land into something magical
and foreboding. Other images focus upwards, capturing the last remaining
columns of a plantation home. These abandoned monoliths seem as
ancient as the trees that surround them, less the product of human
hands than of the land itself. An image of a tree in Woodville,
Mississippi becomes a striking symbol of the condition of the South.
Cutting deep into its trunk, a massive scar
becomes the focal point of an otherwise idyllic image; and yet the
tree continues to thrive, just as the South itself. "These pictures
are about the rivers of blood, of tears, of sweat that Africans
poured into the dark soil of their thankless new home," writes Mann,
remarking on the difference in tone between the "Deep South" and
"Mother Land" images. Pregnant with unseen histories and the anonymous
footsteps of millions, Mann's tea-stained, antique-looking images
depict a landscape of the present in the throes of the past.
To produce the "Deep South" series, Sally Mann traveled alone to
the neighboring states of Mississippi and Louisiana. Bordering on
the Mississippi River, each state is rich with its own history and
mythology, extending from the legacy of slavery to the Confederacy
to the more recent Civil Rights era. While the photographs of the
Virginia landscape in "Mother Land" were charged by Mann's love
and romantic eye for her native landscape, the "Deep South" images
are no less intimate, despite the fact that this was the artist's
first trip to Mississippi. With activist parents and a brother who
was arrested during the Civil Rights demonstrations, Mann's images
are informed by what is most absent in the images: people. A striking
example is a photograph of the Tallahatchie
River in Mississippi. Low to the ground and seemingly anonymous
in its rustic beauty, this ordinarily beautiful spot on the bank
is also the place where the body of a 14-year-old black boy named
Emmett Till was found - kidnapped and killed by a group of whites
in 1955. Mann's camera makes a monument out of the river's silent
edge. Dedicating this work to the memory of young murdered boy,
Mann's other photos in the series have a similar historical charge.
"We must understand that the Mississippi River was a huge swamp,
and now the Delta is completely dry and one of America's most productive
areas, cleared by millions of sweating humans," remarks Mann. Aware
of the ghosts that populate this area, Mann's photographs speak
to humanity's enduring, troubled existence within the landscape.
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