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| "Untitled
(#9 and #12)," 1996. From the "Mother Land" series.
Tea-toned gelatin silver prints; 30 x 48 inches each. © Sally
Mann |
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“Mother Land”
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Outfitting her large-format
8 x 10 camera with undersized and often damaged lenses, Sally Mann’s
contemporary landscape photographs admit the light leaks and imperfections
of the photographic process. Occasionally, a distortion becomes
the central element in a work. These blotches or scratches
seem to erupt out of the atmosphere, obliterating the horizon
and local vegetation. A cloudy
mist hovering over the land is often a part of Mann’s photographic
process. While the pictures of Virginia are dark and lush, saturated
with a romanticism that is the cornerstone of Southern literature,
the images of Georgia tend to be barren and overexposed. These pale,
nearly white images of an abandoned
wall or a fallen tree often evoke a sense of loss. This feeling
is accentuated by the artist’s treatment of the image, washing
out the contrast between light and dark, and using a soft focus
that diminishes detail. Like a hazy memory, the viewer is left struggling
with his or her own means of perception, filling in the narrative
and visual gaps with imagined scenarios.
Sally Mann is an artist deeply in love with the South. Turning to
images of trees, fields, and local ruins after many years of making
her own children and family the subject of her work, Mann has brought
into focus the landscape that formed the backdrop for the "Immediate
Family" series. Steeped in nostalgia, the "Mother Land"
photographs of Georgia and the artist’s native Virginia seem
to emerge out of a different time. Reminiscent of images taken in
the 19th century, the style of Mann’s recent work has been
influenced by a cache of 10,000 glass negatives that she found in
the attic of the University of Lexington in 1972. Taken by a returning
Civil War veteran, Mann discovered that many of the images were
familiar views of the rivers and cliffs that surround her home.
Whereas the post-Civil War images are over a century old and evoke
places in the present, Mann’s "Mother Land" images,
taken in 1996, seem to recall places from a forgotten past. |
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