Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass., through Sept. 23
Sally Mann’s photographs have always been unsettling, said Cate McQuaid in The Boston Globe. Rather than valorizing her subjects, “she looks for the complicated wounds at their heart, the fugitive undercurrents that we politely turn away from.” That instinct almost sunk her in the early 1990s, when she was decried by culture warriors of the era for publishing photos of her children in the nude as they played or lolled about outside the family’s rural Virginia home. Those images are not erotic, though. They roil because the subjects’ every emotion feels wild and unfiltered, and “facing the depth of children’s humanity is frightening.” That ability to capture things the rest of us can’t or prefer not to see is evident in the traveling retrospective of Mann’s work that’s now in Salem, Mass. Her photographs are consistently gorgeous, but like the secrets they reveal, “they often make us uncomfortable.”
“It’s not easy to compare what she does with most of what counts as contemporary art,” said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. As a technician, Mann is a throwback, using such 19th-century methods as tintype and wet-collodion plates to produce images that look “almost perversely out of time, as though caught up in some warped romance with the past.” That’s dangerous territory for a white Southerner, but Mann wants cultural subtexts to be seen, not ignored. Her 1988–91 series “The Two Virginias” addresses her relationship with the AfricanAmerican nanny who raised her, a woman named Virginia Carter who was deeply loved but couldn’t live in the same Virginia that Mann’s family knew. Later, Mann created a series of portraits of AfricanAmerican men in a similar attempt to make amends for past obliviousness. “The resulting images, which dwell on both the fragility and monumentality of these young men’s bodies and faces—still shadowed, even in the 21st century, by the specter of slavery—are among the most powerful in the show.”
In more recent photographs of her family, mortality becomes a consuming theme, said Vicki Goldberg in The New York Times. Her grown children appear in extreme close-ups that suggest each subject’s fragility, especially because we learn that her oldest son battled schizophrenia for years before committing suicide in 2016. Her husband, meanwhile, suffers from muscular dystrophy, and her portraits of him document the ravages of the disease while making expressive use of darkroom chemical effects. In Hephaestus, from 2008, liquid metal appears to be cascading down his withered torso. Mann has always been willing to face darkness, and with images like these, she is doing so “ever more daringly.”