#Sally mann full
#Sally mann series

There is something messy and tactile about what we do.ĮDWThere’s a wonderful phrase you used in Hold Still, when you’re writing about Cy. All of these prints are physical objects they’re not created on the computer screen. For example, the nature and the importance of touch. SALLY MANNI suspect aspects of how we work are very similar. It reminds me of how I have things pinned on my walls, and all the energy spent on things that get looked at, discarded, and replaced.

#Sally mann full

Still, Sally Mann shows that beauty remains present even in death and is treasured by nature, the trees the only witnesses to the dead, serving as their tombs.EDMUND DE WAALThere is a photograph of your darkroom in front of me, and the floor is full of cut-up images. In other snapshots ( Friedericksburg #22) the trees and the sky become threatening and hostile, with mystical outlines defined by a translucent light.

Mann took photos as close as possible to the ground, with the sky almost disappearing from her compositions ( Antietam #14 and Chancellorsville #9), a point of view mimicking the final moments of fallen soldiers on this land. Exclusively in shades of dark grey and black, Battlefields retraces the artist’s steps at the various places where she came across vestiges of the bones of lost soldiers, her photography conjuring their memory. The pictures are a manifestation of the horror stagnating in the places where the battles of the Civil War took place – Mann calls them “body farms”. Through a set of sombre landscapes, the images evoke the grimness of the era of slavery, poverty, injustice, racism and suffering.

#Sally mann series

This series takes its place within Sally Mann’s continual research into the history of her homeland and exposes the blood-stained heritage of the Civil War (1861-1865). If at first sight Deep South appears to be a refuge, a safe haven, this impression cannot suppress an underlying feeling of violence and death. The place that was photographed is the site of a real and identifiable death the trivialness of the river jars with the gravity of the event. Like an uneven scar in the ground, the river is shallow, almost stagnant, surrounded by rocky soil scattered with grass the grandiose vegetation from the other snapshots in the series is nowhere to be seen. Intended as a “visual pilgrimage”, Deep South #34 (Emmett Till River Bank) was taken at the spot where his body was fished out of the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi. One story in particular etched itself into Sally Mann’s mind at a young age: the violent murder of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy, in 1955. From dense vegetation ( Deep South #17) to picturesque springs ( Deep South #13), there is nothing to prepare viewers for the chilling feeling of horror that certain pieces convey. They are a contemplation of the lush nature exalting the beauty of the outdoor spaces of the South of the United States they are also an exhumation of a traumatizing and harrowing past. At first glance, the pictures in the Deep South series appear to be peaceful and luminous landscapes, balancing between dream and reality. This is how Sally Mann approached her research. “Since my place and its story were givens, it remained for me to find those metaphors encoded, half-forgotten clues within the Southern landscape”.