Let me be honest here: Sally Mann is my favorite photographer. I lived in Lexington, VA (Mann’s hometown) for about a year when I was 14, and that was it. That’s when I fell in love with photography – mostly due to Sally Mann’s work.
So, that said, when I heard Sally Mann was debuting a new series of work at the Gagosian Gallery in September, I was incredibly excited. With “Proud Flesh,” photographer Sally Mann turns her camera away from her earlier subjects – childhood, adolescence, life and death, landscape, history – and considers the relationship between husband and wife, turning the tables on the traditionally male artist-dominated lover studies, with a series dedicated to her husband of almost 40 years, Larry Mann.
Mrs. Mann describes their relationship as “love at first sight.” Of note, Mr. Mann – a once strikingly powerful man, who, as told in one story, was capable of independently lifting a heavy stone three men together could not – was diagnosed in 1994 with muscular dystrophy, an incurable disease that has weakened his muscle tissue.
There has always been a palpable honesty to Mann’s work – sometimes haunting, often beautiful, sometimes intimidating, other times heartbreaking. Take, for example, the photographs she took of her children years ago for 1990′s “Immediate Family” (some of the most powerful portraits I’ve ever seen – see images below). These provoked controversy for their unflinching look at childhood in its entirety – curious, passionate, proud, peaceful, and, yes, sexual beings. Mrs. Mann does not shy away from the truth – she openly embraces it. And “Proud Flesh” is no exception.
As she describes it in a recent essay, “Rhetorically circumnavigate it any way you will, but exploitation lies at the root of every interaction between photographer and subject, even forty years into it. Larry and I both understand how ethically complex and potent the act of making photographs is, how freighted with issues of honesty, responsibility, power, and complicity, and how so many good images come at the expense of the sitter, in one way or another. These new images, we both knew, would come at his.”
“It is a testament to Larry’s tremendous dignity and strength that he allowed me to take the pictures that I did. The gods might reasonably have slapped this particular lantern out of my raised hand, for before me lay a man as naked and vulnerable as any wretch strung across the mythical, vulture-topped rock. At our ages, we are past the prime of life, given to sinew and sag, and Larry bears, with his trademark god-like nobility, the further affliction of a late-onset muscular dystrophy. That he was so willing is both heartbreaking and terrifying at once.”
WIth “Proud Flesh,” some of the ideas and emotions Mann’s focused on in past work converge: sexuality, strength and weakness, vulnerability and, so importantly, trust. Larry Mann is her husband and lover, yes, which provides a rich, new dimension; he’s also a man weakened by illness. This element cannot be ignored, and presents a different level of intimacy in Mann’s work.
Sally Mann writes,”Most of the pictures I take are of the things I love, the things that fascinate and compel me, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to look at or take … I look, all the time, at the people and places I care about, and I look with both ardor and frank, aesthetic, cold appraisal. And I look with the passions of both eye and heart, but in that ardent heart, there must also be a splinter of ice.”
“And so it was with fire and ice, the studio woodstove too far away from the light to do him any good on a cold winter afternoon, that Larry and I began this work of exploring what it means to grow older, to let the sunshine fall voluptuously on a still-beautiful form, and to spend quiet afternoons together again. No phone, no kids, two fingers of bourbon, the smell of the ether, the two of us—still in love, still at work.”
“Proud Flesh” opens September 15th at Gagosian’s 980 Madison gallery. Aperture is releasing a book of the same title in coordination.
All images courtesy of Gagosian.
For more info, visit Gagosian.com
For several images from Mann’s “Immediate Family” series, check out:
Plus, see a clip from “What Remains,” the 2006 documentary focused on Mann’s series of the same title:
And for an interesting interview with Sally Mann on Charlie Rose:
