Sally Mann

Sally Mann has been a both an extremely gifted yet controversial photographer since her beginning.  The film we watched progressively went through her most recent exhibits as well as the motivation behind these exhibits and photographs.  Sally Mann may be most well known for the photos she took of her three children.  Many of the pictures were nude, from when the children were very young to about the age of pre-teen.  Her children inspired her and were always willing to model. Though she became famous, she was accused of taking child pornography and had a very difficult time handling these accusations. 

Mann explained how she saw beauty in everything, making it easy for her to take pictures.  After a while she decided to switch her artistic focus from pictures of her children to pictures of landscape.  People were excited and surprised she could take such beautiful landscape photographs.  She explained in the movie that she also loves when something goes wrong while either taking or developing a picture.  She loves when dust is blown and hits her negative, or exhaust smoke comes out in her prints, which seems a bit counter-intuitive.  When these unexpected things would happen, she thought it gave her photos a more organic feel.

Her last three sets of work explained in the film were a series of her married life, a series revolving around death, and a series of self photographs.  The series of her married life stared her husband and daily marriage activities.  The series of death was very dark and it was the result of her fascination with death.  She wanted people to fully embrace life and to love the people you have while they’re still here.  The final scenes were of her taking self photographs.  The series was not finished but it looked promising.  I really enjoyed learning about Sally Mann, especially since I had admired pictures of hers previously, without knowing they belonged to her.  My favorite of her series are the pictures she took of her children, I thought they were remarkable.