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Sally Mann: The Family and The Land
I was once asked what my work was about and before I could think about something art-speaky and smart, my lizard brain instructed my tongue to say “The family and the land.” Once it was out, I tried to tart it up with profundities but stopped, realizing that there was, at least for me, nothing of greater significance. That’s it. That’s the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.
Until I was sent to boarding school in chill New England, the farm where I live and the greater South that embraces it, were as elemental to me as the air I breathed. Separated from them for the 6 years of my good Northern education, I suffered some of the pain of Faulkner’s anguished Quentin Compson, missing my homeland with an almost physical pain. I returned to my native Virginia in 1972 and almost every picture I have taken since then has involved the complicated Southern landscape and the lives of the three children that we raised within it.
While not a retrospective, this show takes us on an abbreviated tour of these concerns over about 25 years; the “Immediate Family” pictures of 1984–1994, the “Virginia” and “Deep South” landscapes overlapping and succeeding the family work, the otherworldly faces of the children, now mature, and my interest in the natural cycle of death and renewal in “Matter Lent” and “What Remains.”
—Sally Mann
Image:
Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia, 1989, gelatin-silver print 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
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email | call Robin McCarthy at 626.577.9696 extension 300 |