Sally Mann’s method of dealing with things is to document them with photography in a way that is no longer the usual method of interpreting them. While most parents see their children and take snapshots of their childhood, Sally decided to turn their childhood into art. The kind of access you get with family members and those close to you is almost absolute, really only limited by their comfort with it and your willingness to document it. However in documenting people that are close to you objectivity becomes skewed. I believe Sally’s turning them into art is a great way to over come that hurdle. A major sacrifice you make by doing this though is privacy, you end up either sacrificing vital moments of life to privacy or you sacrifice your privacy or the privacy of those around you for art. This can be a delicate balancing act as you do not want to alienate your friends and family, however if you are going to document these things you do not want an incomplete record.
It appears that in Sally’s mind the whole world is a goldmine of untapped pictures just waiting to come to life. She mentions that n her childhood she was given a book about there being beautiful pictures hidden in plain sight all around her. I believe she took this to heart more so than most people would have and decided that it was her duty to seek these pictures out and expose them to the whole world. This is very evident in the detail shots she takes, but also to an extent in the portrait shots she takes. The pictures seem to be capturing a single moment that could be fleeting in a regular person, but makes the moment timeless, much as the statue of The David has a hip positioning that can only be held for a split second while switching one’s weight from one hip to another. However Sally does this with positioning of objects and facial expression.
Watching Sally’s documenting of her husbands degenerative illness reminds me of my avoidance of my sister’s four year battle with cancer which she eventually died from. While this made me feel as if I should have documented my sister’s illness I realize that, that was not truly available to me at the time of her illness, as most of the time she was in Philadelphia getting’s treatment, or for the final two years of it I was away from home and only saw her when I came home for breaks and the last time when I spent two weeks at home when she was in the final stages of dying.
Since getting serious about photography I have often pondered about something I can do as a long-term project to document something about myself. Over the summer after taking some self-portraits, I discovered some old photography I had done where I had taken pictures of myself. Looking into it I found that there are in fact quite a few portraits of me taken by my mother, however I had posed myself for the camera. On top of that once I had a camera of my own I took pictures of myself that reflect how I thought of myself. I’m currently tracking down where a bunch of them got to and trying to figure out the chronology, to see how my self-image developed through photography. This is a major benefit of having a photographically prolific mother. One of the more difficult aspects of this is to accurately deduce the chronology of the pictures; another is to admit to myself what I actually thought of myself at that time.
Sally’s series on landscapes where a great many people have died is kind of a strange documentation to me. It is actually documenting a non-event. In many ways it is like the Carl Sandburg poem “Grass” which goes thusly:
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
However it resonates with me because of a project I thought up during the summer where I would look for old photos of things that happened in my childhood and go back to that spot, and position my camera the same way the camera in the picture was. Of course there will be no one in the picture and it will be essentially a landscape or still life, but it is a record of the change after something happens. With Sally being a southerner civil war battlefields are places where great events occurred and the memory of those events is remembered in the collective stories of small southern towns. I am a Italian Mick from New Jersey, all my great events occurred around family events and happened much more recently than the civil war. This means that there has been less time for there to be change, but living in an urban environment leads to there being a great deal of change in 10 years as opposed to a preserved civil war battlefield. Also my project uses juxtaposition.
