Infamous photographer finally releases memoir
Sally Mann is among the most celebrated and accomplished photographers of her generation, but also the most infamous, owing largely to the explosive controversy her project, “Immediate Family,” generated in the early 1990s.
Photographing her children in the throes of daily life on her Virginia farm, “Immediate Family” stirred up a villainizing puritan impulse in America and around the world, gaining her both instant fame and also a cross to bear.
More than 20 years later, Mann has published a new memoir, Hold Still, that puts it all in context — her own “feral” childhood in Virginia, life in the South, her deep connection to the land, to family and the joy and intensity of everyday life.
A lot of your photographs are very intimate and personal — maybe all of them. But they’re still very oblique and open to various readings.
Boy, do I know that (laughs).
But writing it all down in a memoir is a lot more solidly defined. Was part of the reason for doing this to clear the air of past misconceptions?
I really didn’t want this to be a scoresettling — “Now I finally tell my side of the story.”
That’s one of the things that’s driven me nuts about this book. There are 67 pages out of a 500-page book that are devoted to the family pictures. I really was trying to keep it to an absolute minimum.
So what’s your relationship to those pictures now?
I got so sick of them I took them off the market and put them in a box under my bed more than a dozen years ago.
I haven’t looked at them, I haven’t sold them, I haven’t printed them and I haven’t thought of them.
I knew when this book was coming out that I’d have to be able to talk about them again, but I’m still pretty inchoate on the whole subject.
In the early ’90s, when they were first published, they were a real sensation — there were allegations of child pornography, exploitation, indecency; some even suggested you might be vulnerable to criminal charges. Considering the world we live in now, do you think those pictures would have caused the same disturbance?
I don’t think I would run any risk of being thrown in jail. I think that whole thing has been settled in the courts — thank God, not by me — but it’s been pretty conclusively pushed back in the bottle.
I don’t think I’d have any trouble getting them published now, either. But there’s a difference of opinion. It’s hard to remember how naive we were back then — how few images, and how unavailable, they were. I think we’ve all been forced to ask ourselves many more questions now, so I don’t think there’d be a stink over them at all.
In 2007, you said that “time, memory, loss and love are my main artistic concerns.” Do you still feel that way?
I think that quote is really talking about the south — those are my themes, but those are the themes of the south. You can throw in ruin and decay, and misplaced honour, an obsession with death — there are a few things I think that are special to that place. But if you wanted to narrow it down, those are the themes of the south.
Sally Mann in conversation with Ryerson Image Centre director Paul Roth begins Friday at 7 p.m. at Ryerson University, 350 Victoria St.
“I really didn’t want this to be a score-settling — ‘Now I finally tell my side of the story.’ That’s one of the things that’s driven me nuts about this book. There are 67 pages out of a 500-page book that are devoted to the family pictures.”
SALLY MANN