Do you ever use a digital camera? Just for snapshots. “And I must do so with both warm ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of both eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.” By phone, I spoke with the 64-year-old artist about the fate of art photography in the age of selfies and Snapchat-and about the thinking behind her new series, her most challenging to date.
“To be able to take my pictures, I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about,” she writes. “I existed in a welter of creativity,” she recalls, “sleepless, anxious, self-doubting, pressing for both perfection and impiety, like some ungodly cross between a hummingbird and a bulldozer.” But what makes Mann’s search for creative origins a contemporary classic is her frank reckoning with the downsides of exposure, from the firestorm that erupted over the photographs of her children (they also drew the attentions of a stalker), to her deeply reasoned thoughts on the transgressive, transcendent act of portraiture. Beginning with the family boxes stored in her attic, which she unpacks to uncover “a payload of Southern gothic”-fortunes made and lost, hidden love affairs, and a truly bizarre murder-suicide-Mann compellingly connects the past to her own clothing-averse and horses- and boys-obsessed childhood her close bond with Gee-Gee, the African-American woman who helped raise her and her decision to commit herself to a career in photography while she was a student at Bennington. In Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (Little, Brown), Mann reflects on her life and work with the same unflinching vitality. Whatever her subject, Mann’s work is both lyrical and unsettling, evoking universal human themes of innocence, eroticism, and mortality. Her subjects-captured in arrestingly candid, luminous black-and-white images-have included her own young children, facing down the slings and arrows of childhood in Immediate Family (1992) the beloved Shenandoah Valley landscapes of her youth, revisited with an adult understanding of historical wounds in Deep South (2005) and her once strong-bodied husband of more than four decades, Larry, ravaged by muscular dystrophy in Proud Flesh (2009). Sally Mann has spent her career examining those things closest to her.
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