SALLY MANN: STILL TIME
In one striking image from 1989, “Hayhook,” seven-year-old Jessie hangs by her hands, her bare body stretched like a gymnast’s or a carcass, from a farmer’s hay hook in the porch rafters. Her parents’ friends chat at the outskirts of the frame, oblivious as this albino filly extends her limbs to gallop in midair. Children are the only real actors in these dreamscapes, though they often play uncannily adult roles. Jessie’s younger sister, Virginia, stands beside a tree trunk, a devilish Cupid suggestively sucking at a length of hose.
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Other photographs are provocative psychologically, like “Ditch” (1987), in which eight-year-old Emmett wriggles on his back down a narrow canal to the river–Mann’s emblem of the flux and recurrence of experience. Again, adults watch blithely from the periphery, their heads cropped. We wonder if these headless observers can recognize the boy’s rite for what it appears to be from the vantage of his mother’s camera: a repetition, in earth and sluice, of his passage through the birth canal? Or is the phallic shape of Emmett’s ditch important? Is he seeking separation from the familiar as he pushes into life’s stream, or fantasizing the opposite journey, through the passage of his birth back into the womb?
After such a tender introduction to her family, one can imagine how upset Mann must have been by the murmurs of child abuse that countered the praise for Immediate Family when the series first appeared at New York’s Houk Friedman Gallery in April 1992, shortly before the book was published. The current retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Photography offers a polite selection of only nine Immediate Family images–an uncommon self-censorship, presumably aimed at avoiding further inflammation. The exhibit, curated by museum director Denise Miller-Clark and by Mann herself, seems to bear in mind the present fragility of Mann’s reputation.
The series began with a photo made in 1984 that also begins the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s selection from Immediate Family. This troubling head-on portrait features Jessie, age two, in an old-fashioned lace-collared dress, her right eye swollen half shut. Before Immediate Family Mann rarely titled her work, but this picture bears the hefty label “Damaged Child”–also the title of a 1936 photograph by Dorothea Lange.
The Museum of Contemporary Photography retrospective helps us put missing pieces of Mann’s story in place with unpublished early photographs from Mann’s personal collection. A 1974 self-portrait, for instance, hints uncannily at the sexualized child portraits to come.
These are distanced, third-person shots, however; they don’t have the first-person inflections of Immediate Family, where the camera angles are looser and more playful, and the danger is all imaginary. Much of the exhilaration of Immediate Family lies in its formal innovation beyond At Twelve. When Mann comes to photograph her own kids, the restrained, forthright spaces of At Twelve give way to more experimental constructions. Suddenly the images are larger, uncropped, and free to run a tonal gamut from thick blacks to nearly transparent whites. Borders push outward, into the broad, shallow space that is the domain of the wide-angle lens. For the first time Mann’s camera approaches the world at curious, personal angles. Her incisively selective focus draws us to the lush center of each frame, where childhood fleetingly emerges from its blur.
