As for me, I see both the beauty and the dark side of the things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as well. And I see them at the same time, at once ecstatic at the beauty of things, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means "beauty tinged with sadness," for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.
Sally Mann, ‘Hold Still; A Memoir with Photographs.'
For a visual artist
straddling the 20th and 21st centuries, photographer
Sally Mann is remarkably rooted in her native soil. Born in Lexington,
Virginia, in 1951, she has lived in Rockridge County for all her life apart
from a spell at school in Vermont when she was a teenager. She married Larry
Mann in 1970 and the couple raised their three children in the house they built
on a farm bought on impulse by Sally’s medical practitioner father in the late
1950’s. Her work is rooted in history, in place, in family, in community but is
not constrained in any way by the idyllic surroundings of the Shenandoah valley
because her themes are the eternal verities, life and death, light and darkness,
love, loss, memory and the unremitting flight of time. She acquired public notoriety in 1992 with her
exhibition and third monograph ‘Immediate Family’. A cover article for the New
York Times Magazine focussed on photographs Mann had taken of her children
naked in the arcadian surroundings of the family farm. The author, Robert
Woodward, claimed Mann had been told that “no fewer than eight pictures she had
chosen for the traveling exhibition could subject her to arrest” for displaying
indecent images. Her work was denounced as child pornography, often by people
who had never seen it, and whilst the controversy made ‘Immediate Family’ a
publishing sensation and Mann a celebrity, it was damaging to her reputation
and brought with it much unwanted attention.
Surprisingly perhaps further
controversy did not ensue when Mann published ‘What Remains’ in 2003, a book
which features photographs of decomposing corpses taken at the University of
Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Facility, more generally known as the Body
Farm. Regarding ‘What Remains’, Blake Morrison noted in the Gurdian “her
point being that death is not an end, that nature goes on doing its work long
after the body has become a carapace. When her exhibition of that title opened
in Washington in 2004, most reviewers got the point: "But not the woman in
the New York Times, who freaked out and called the photos gross." Mann was
surprised to see an art critic using the vocabulary of a 10-year-old, but not
by the underlying prejudice: "There's a new prudery around death. We've
moved it into hospital, behind screens, and no longer wear black markers to
acknowledge its presence. It's become unmentionable."
In the introduction to her book Mann says that her ‘kids chalk up my “death thing” to genetics, blaming it, along with other things I do, on my father.” Robert S. Munger, her father, was a GP, who for four decades ‘labored over his great masterwork…exploring the iconography of death in art.’ He was, she says, ‘even for the time,..an uncommonly direct man. Not for him the euphemisms of death – it was a dead body, not “remains,” nobody “passed,” there was no “eternal rest.” People died and that was it.’ He died himself in 1988, suffering from cancer he committed suicide with an overdose of Seconal. His death ‘laid me flat for almost a year. Now, many deaths later, I am as perplexed by the experience as ever. Where did all of that him-ness go? All that knowledge, the accretion of experience from a remarkable life, the suffering – his and others’ – he had borne, the beauty, life’s own rapturous visions?” He died on the couch in the family living room and Mann took a famous picture of him post mortem, lying in his red robe, wild flowers laid on his chest and circling his wrists.
‘What Remains’ is split
into four sections; the first ‘Matter Lent’ begins with a quote from the 17th
century French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet
All things summon us to
death: nature, almost envious of the good she has given us, tells us often and
gives us notice that she cannot for long allow us that scrap of matter she has
lent…she has need of it for other forms, she claims it back for other works.
In the pages that follow, Mann explores the physical processes by which the matter lent to us during our lives is returned to the natural world after our deaths. She draws us gently into the theme beginning with the decayed remains of her pet greyhound Eva, who died one Valentines Day and for whom Mann ‘wept noisily’. “And yet,” she says “I was still curious about what would finally become of that head I had stroked, oh, ten thousand times, those paws she so delicately crossed as she lay by my desk, rock hard nails emerging from the finest white hair.” So with the help of a friend, Mann buries her much loved Eva in a metal cage on the farm and a few weeks later disinters her to find “what looked like a stick drawing of a sleeping dog; her bones, punctuated by tufts of indigestible hair and small cubes of adipocere, appeared like a constellation in a rich black sky.” The first photos of Eva show her hide; presumably Mann’s friend, who ‘didn’t bat an eye’ at what she asked him to do, had skinned Eva for her, before helping to bury the greyhound. A series of Mann’s darkly sensuous images then show us the teeth, claws and bones of the dead dog. Then a quote from the poet Galway Kinnell (lamenting the barrenness of embalming and its prevention of decomposition) stands opposite a tenebrous landscape of leaves and grass in which a tiny sluglike old-fashioned shroud, tied neatly at both ends, shines luminously white. We are on the body farm. These are not documentary photographs but beautiful as they are, there is no attempt to disguise the subject matter. Bodies bloated with the post mortem gases produced by the corpses intestinal flora, skin split as it swells, skin being sloughed off, faces reduced to eyeless sockets and bared teeth. One photo shows a face apparently enveloped in mist; I thought it must be a spider’s web. In ‘Hold Still’ Mann reveals that the face was in fact a mass of writhing blow fly maggots (she provides a graphic colour image to confirm it), the gauzy film that veils it in the final black and white photograph was produced by a long exposure which reduced the motion of the insects to a fine blur.
The section ‘December 8,
2000’ records the day a 19-year-old police fugitive broke onto the Mann family
property. When cornered by the police he hid himself behind a tree within sight
of the Mann’s house, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Later Mann
photographs the landscape where the suicide took place, the tracks left by the
police cars in the meadow grass, the space around the tree where the body lay. “Death
has left for me its imperishable mark on an ordinary copse of trees in the
front yard,” Mann says, “But would a stranger, coming upon it a century hence,
sense the sanctity of the death-inflected soil?” The next section, ‘Antietam’,
answers that question. It is a series of landscape photos taken on the site of
the Battle of Antietam, in Sharpsburg, Maryland where in 1862 the armies of Confederate
General Robert E. Lee and Union General George B. McClellan, fought on the
bloodiest day in American history, with 22,727 men dead, wounded or missing. Mann’s photos, all apparently taken at night,
may be darkly foreboding and dramatic but we know that this has everything to
do with her artistic vision and little to do with the actual landscape. The
final section ‘What Remains’ begins with a quote from Mann’s beloved Ezra Pound;
What thou lovest
well remains
the rest is
dross
What thou lov’t
well shall not be
reft from thee
It continues with 20 portraits of her children, cropped images of their faces. What remains is the love? It sounds trite but it isn’t, the series portraits grows more distorted with each shot, one is faded out except for a pair of lips, in others there are scratches and marks in the negatives, or the print is so dark the face resembles a skull with huge black sockets and the blanched skin looking like bone. What remains? Nothing. Love. Memory, The body. It all goes, it all ceases to exist.
In 2015 Mann published a 570 page memoir called ‘Hold Still’ and last year reissued it in paperback as one of their Modern Classics series. There is plenty of stiff competition out there but this book is one of the best autobiographies I have ever read. Mann is as talented a writer as she is a photographer. She may not have moved very far from Lexington and even now spends most of her time at home but her life is fascinating from her feral childhood (her description) to her stately old age (she is now 74, though you wouldn’t guess it to see her). The book seems blisteringly honest; she does not shy away from or make excuses for her relatively privileged upbringing. There is a fascinating account of Gee-Gee, Virgina Carter, the black nanny who brought up Mann and her siblings and to whom she felt closer than to her own mother. Her portrait of Carter and the belated realisation of the difficulties a black woman living in Virginia would have faced are compulsive reading. As is her own and her husband’s family history (her mother-in-law murdered her husband and then committed suicide). This isn’t a straight forward memoir; some readers have felt short changed because they felt Mann doesn’t reveal enough of her personal life, others feel that she doesn’t focus enough on her work and others feel that the non-linear narrative is distracting. Despite all this it was a best seller in the US. I think it is a wonderful book, I love the meandering form, I love its willingness to grasp thorny issues, quite frankly I love everything about it. The woman is a genius and don’t let anyone tell you any different.
