by Sally Mann
And boy, were they strong. My feelings were of the most vital, the sine qua non, the fight to the death, the lie down in front of the bulldozers, forgo all food and water, but never, ever lose the farm variety. I had loved that farm since the day we got it. At age twelve I galloped bareback through pastures mined with groundhog holes, swimming Khalifa in the river to escape the flies, and fishing until it was too dark even to see the pale albino carp floating in the shallows.
What momentous family event did we not celebrate on the farm, what birthday, holiday, anniversary? There is no sinkhole into which we have not poked our walking sticks, no time-stretched initials carved in smooth beech bark that we have not traced with our wondering fingers, no deer trails unfollowed, no cliff from which we haven’t dislodged medium-sized stones to make large-sized holes in our waiting canoe below, no deeply romantic swimming holes unsounded. The farm is a constant for all of us, glowing steadily in the unreliable, teasingly labile shadow of memory.
After I was sent to boarding school I wrote heartbroken love poems to the farm. Among my first curling, yellowed contact sheets of 35 mm images are dozens of pictures taken there.
When I began photographing with my 5 × 7 inch view camera, of course I hauled it out to the pastures, the woods, and the cabin.
Heartbreakingly, when I went to my storage box to pull the negatives of these images, the emulsion of every one was reticulate with cracks. They had been destroyed by vinegar syndrome, which afflicts certain “safety films” introduced early in the twentieth century to replace flammable nitrate film, the film on which my father made his images. Here’s what they all look like now.
My manifest farm passion did not put me in a good bargaining position when I approached my two brothers to buy out their parts of the mutually owned property. They, reasonably enough, thought of it as their patrimony, but a fungible one. It was clearly our only inheritance, as a very modest sum remained in my mother’s account after my father’s death in 1988. The farm was basically all that was left for the three of us.
Of the predictably biblical, epic, and divisive negotiations involved in establishing a value for the farm, the less said the better. Only a gorgeous piece of good land can provoke that kind of piercing despair and dispute. Failed loves, complicated family relationships, broken hearts, errant children, lost lives—nothing so engages a southern heart as a good piece of family land.
But, having agreed on a price many decimals removed from the now mythical, fairy-tale-sounding $75 an acre my father paid, in early 1998 Larry and I walked into the local Farm Credit office and asked to borrow 100 percent of the purchase price for a farm upon which we were immediately going to place a conservation easement, thereby lowering the value by 30 percent.
The loan officer looked skeptical. I explained winningly that we would surely be able to make the mortgage payments with the sales of as-yet-untaken images of the Deep South, a trip on which I would be embarking the afternoon of the closing. Bless his heart, taking a look at my camera, portable darkroom, provisions, and maps in the Suburban parked outside his office, and infected with my confidence, he said okay. We had the loan.
We celebrated that night at the cabin, the repository of so many memories, but before I pulled out the next morning to head south, I made sure the cattle-running tenant was notified to take his stock off the farm and never come back, remembering my two horses, Fleet and Khalifa, he sold to be slaughtered.
Featured in so many of my photographs, the cabin perches at the very apex of the Maury River’s exceptional oxbow around our farm. Emerging from the woods into the clearing where the cabin sits, the first-time visitor must crank back the noggin as the amazed eyes begin their long climb up the multicolored, New Mexico–looking cliff face towering over the river.
Scraggly arborvitae cling tenuously to it, or hang by their last roots—the same trees, in fact, that appear in a glass negative taken at this site in the 1860s by a returning Civil War veteran, Michael Miley.
Back in my early twenties, I had discovered some 7,500 Miley glass-plate negatives stored in an attic on the Washington and Lee campus. I knew Miley had photographed Robert E. Lee in retirement here, but the negatives I found included none of those relatively famous images. Instead I found pictures of familiar local places, many all but unchanged in the intervening century, among them several of the stretch of river where the cabin is now. This dark pool was a popular swimming hole in the 1800s, and it is easy to imagine that Lee himself swam there or, even more likely, Stonewall Jackson.
As I held those dusty Miley plates to the light, in the same careful way I now hold my own glass negatives, I found myself weirdly shifting between the centuries. In that same time-warpy way, the view we see now from the cabin deck has remained virtually unchanged for 150 years: the arborvitae pictured as a sapling in front of the cave opening in the Miley image almost certainly is the fallen, bleached tree trunk off to the left in this modern photo.
The grandson of a county native recently gave me a written account that describes a camp in the late 1800s where the cabin is now. Its name, the Covenanter Camp, would have pleased Stonewall Jackson, alluding to the religious and military history of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who first settled the area. The camp director, indeed, was a grizzled Confederate veteran who ran the place on rigid military lines. Surprisingly, it was coed, with twenty-five girls and seventy boys at the two-week session. A tent city was erected with a central “Main Street” dividing boys from girls, and a large cook tent anchored the operation.
Apparently, scheduled activities were few. Mostly the kids swam and raced and threw horseshoes, and once, for sport, in the absence of a pig, they greased and chased a kid named Tricky Johenning. Until the large beach along the river at the camp was literally sold out from under them to a man in need of sand to make brick mortar, the Covenanter Camp prospered and the kids played tirelessly on the beach and in the river.
Nearly a century later, so did our three children, Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia, not nearly as well covered up and making do with a smaller beach, but enough of one to serve the purpose for sand burials, castles, and sunbathing. On that beach and by that same river I began taking the family pictures, consisting of at least two hundred final images, some sixty of which were published in 1992 in Immediate Family. These pictures cannot be understood without the context of the farm and the cabin on the river—the intrinsic timelessness of the place and the privacy it afforded us.
7
Hold Still
On June 4, 1993, eight years into taking the pictures of my children, I wrote this to my friend Maria Hambourg:
So, I have come to a quiet moment before my daily walk to meet the girls after school (surveillance and protection of children still in force) and I face the blue screen, trying to reconstruct what has happened since we sat at your dinner table.
I’m stronger now, though I haven’t taken any new pictures, which is where my strength has usually come from. I am still afraid for the children, the boogeyman kind of fear that may not leave me until they have outgrown their present skins. And I’m still afraid that the good pictures won’t come, as usual.
This year, though, the good pictures of the kids might not come. The fear may scare them off. My conviction and belief in the work was so unshakably strong for so many years, and my passion for making it was so undeniable. Now, it is no longer the same: I am frightened of the pictures, I am reluctant to push the limits. I suspect this work is dying its natural death: I sense fertile ground as I bury it, though, and a new kind of wisdom that comes with the acceptance of the limits I wanted to push for so long.
The phenomenon of the last year spun me around and now leaves me wobbling, like a spent top, towards stasis. I am grateful for the peace that has finally begun to settle again in our lives: the phone calls are fewer, the list of sold prints within a year of being completed: I have the sense that I am getting control again. And I’m oh so much smarter now: I’ve had my 15 minutes and never has th
e sweet tedium of my life looked better.
The family pictures changed all our lives in ways we never could have predicted, in ways that affect us still. Their genesis was in simple exploration, at times of a documentary nature, at others conceptual or aesthetic and, in the best pictures, all at once. But the simplicity of intention and vision with which I began became complicated over time, by narrative, by defiance, by the natural evolution of an aesthetic, by doubt, and, yes, by fear.
Those pictures, rooted in our family’s domestic routines and our little postage stamp of native soil, had the unlikely effect of delivering the kind of overnight international celebrity that so many people, including many threadbare artists, desire. Clichés tell us that fame is a prize that burns the winner. The clichés are often right. As Adam Gopnik once remarked, when we hit pay dirt, we often find quicksand beneath it.
The wobbling-top analogy I used with Maria isn’t far off the mark; this brush with celebrity spun me near senseless. My refuge then, as it had been since childhood, was the farm, where within the sweet insularity of its boundaries I still find my equilibrium.
Never had I needed that equilibrium, the soothing balm of perfect proportion and beauty that I find on the farm, more than I did then. Most people who know me well, and even those who don’t but know my work, will eventually use the word “fearless” to describe who they think I am. Maybe it’s deserved, to a degree; certainly my horse-racing life qualifies, and sometimes, perhaps, my artistic life. But that mettle, the recklessness, self-possession, and hauteur—I know where that comes from.
My father was a renegade Texan with an excellent northern education, an atheist, and an intellectual. He kept packs of big dogs, bought art (Kandinsky and Matisse in the 1930s, Twombly in the fifties) and drove fast foreign cars. As a southern family in the 1950s and sixties, we were simply different and we knew it.
Other families had crèches at Christmas, but our living room had this decoration, to my mother’s feigned mortification.
With Man Ray–like obsession, my father collected stuff and made singular art pieces late in the night in his workroom, even once replacing an uninspired floral arrangement on the dining room table with this, a petrified dog turd.
On the morning that his gardens were open to the Virginia State Garden Tour (you remember how to pronounce garden, don’t you?), he put this sculpture on one of the back trails at the base of a big oak. When my mother came upon it with her group of white-gloved ladies trilling with nervous laughter, she rued the day she’d fallen for that irreverent wag.
He called it Portnoy’s Triple Complaint, and after someone sent Philip Roth a photograph of it, Roth wrote back:
I react with wonder and awe. None of us should complain, of course; art reminds us of that. Dr. Munger is a brave man to have such a thing in his garden. I would be tarred and feathered and thrown out of my town if I dared. Luckily people forgive me my books.
But, while bodacious and impious, my father was also compassionate. He believed in socialized medicine, stating often that medical care is like education: everyone should have access to it. When the community doctors met and agreed to raise the rates for an office visit to seven dollars, Daddy lowered his to five. My mother, who at first kept his books, despaired of his refusal to charge those who could not afford to pay.
She once saw a patient who had not paid for the last several babies my father had delivered by lantern light at his remote home. The man was leaving the liquor store with an armload of bourbon as she was going in.
Indignantly she confronted my father about it at dinner that night and he responded flatly, “If you owed the doctor as much as that man owes me, you would want a drink, too.”
He had strongly held beliefs and was brave about asserting them. And he made us kids be brave, too, facing the little-understood challenges of civil rights, integration, and separation of church and state. During the early 1960s the schools we attended had daily Bible study and I was the only grade-school child who had to leave the classroom and sit outside the principal’s office while others studied Scripture. I can still remember the burning humiliation of having the younger students going single-file to lunch pointing and making fun of me. Never had I wanted more to be just like everyone else. But my father wouldn’t yield, and year after year I masked my mortification with indifferent cockiness.
Our family had no wood-sided station wagon, no country club membership, no television, no church, and no colonial house in the new subdivision. We read the New York Times and used the sports pages to line the parakeet’s cage. I think my father came to believe long ago what Rhett Butler told Scarlett: reputation is something people with character can do without.
Character and character building (other words, I guess, for sucking it up) were a big deal in our family. I have wondered whether my parents were right to expect me to suffer for a concept about which I lacked the maturity to form an opinion. Of course the fact that this parallels the situation of my own children, snickered at by their classmates for being in unconventional pictures, hasn’t escaped my notice. I think the lessons I learned from my father, as painful as they occasionally were, made me the character I am. I don’t regret them, especially as we could retreat to the farm, where who we were seemed normal.
Even now, when I look at the arc of my work, those pictures taken on the farm and at the cabin seem more balanced, less culturally influenced and more universal, than those taken anywhere else—like this little honey of an image made years before I’d even identified my children as possible subjects.
Why it took me so long to find the abundant and untapped artistic wealth within family life, I don’t know. I took a few pictures with the 8 × 10 inch camera when Emmett was a baby, but for years I shot the under-appreciated and extraordinary domestic scenes of any mother’s life with the point-and-shoot.
Like this one of my preemie Jessie, born in 1981, hardly bigger than the spoon with which I stirred my tea:
And her miraculous survival after countless bouts of pneumonia: Where was my camera then?
I missed so many opportunities, now tantalizingly fading away in the scrapbooks:
The puking,
the pets:
… and the toilet training, the never-ending toilet training.
Maybe at first I didn’t see those things as art because, with young babies in the house, you remove your “photography eyes,” as Linda Connor once called the sensibility that allows ecstatic vision. Maybe it was because the miraculous quotidian (oxymoronic as that phrase may seem) that is part of child rearing must often, for species survival, veil the intensely seeing eye.
I know for sure that the intensely seeing eye was different from the one I used to quarter thousands of school-lunch apples and braid miles of hair through my decades of motherhood. I had to promote this form of special vision and place myself, with deliberate foresight, on a collision course with felicitous, gift-giving Chance. I described this state in a 1987 letter:
I am working, every day,… on new photographs. This body of work, family pictures, is beginning to take on a life of its own. Seldom, but memorably, there are times when my vision, even my hand, seems guided by, well, let’s say a muse. There is at that time an almost mystical rightness about the image: about the way the light is enfolding, the way the [kids’] eyes have taken on an almost frightening intensity, the way there is a sudden, almost outer-space-like, quiet.
These moments nurture me through the reemergence into the quotidian… through the bill paying and the laundry and the shopping for soccer shoes, although I am finding that I am becoming increasingly distant, like I am somehow living full time in those moments.
And again to Maria Hambourg in April 1989:
Good photographs are gifts.… Taken for granted they don’t come. I set the camera up and… suspend myself in that familiar space about a foot above the ground where good photographs come. I wait there, breath suppressed, in that trance, that state of suspended animation, the moment before the
frisson.…
It has always worked before and the moment when it starts to come is unlike anything else: when it falls so perfectly into place and Jessie cocks her hip and doesn’t move out of the 1 inch of focus I have: when the wind blows up just the right little tracery in the water behind the alligator. That moment possesses such a feeling of transcendence: it’s the ecstatic time: better than sex. The parallels are all too obvious and can only be understood, I maintain, by a woman.
But it wasn’t really until 1985 that I put on my photography eyes, and began to see the potential for serious imagery within the family. I began, as I often do, with a promising near miss, using the 8 × 10 view camera to photograph Virginia’s birth.
I had delivered both Emmett and Jessie without any drugs at all, damn near the hardest things I have ever done in my life. It was especially painful with the first child, Emmett, a relative porker at over six pounds, but easier with Jessie, who weighed in at only four pounds and change. Both were fairly fast deliveries, but with intense and unrelenting contractions that I barely managed with Lamaze breathing, Larry at my side. I figured I could do it one more time, and why not try a picture?