by Sally Mann
Two weeks before Virginia’s due date, I took my 8 × 10 to the birthing room and set it up, pressing into service as my stand-in a bewildered candy striper who lay on the bed in what we assumed would be my posture at delivery. I focused on her hands demurely pressing her skirt down between her legs, which were elevated in steel stirrups the way we gave birth back then. Leaving the camera bellows at exactly that extension, I removed the camera from the tripod, and bent over my balance-destroying belly to make grease-pencil circles on the floor where the tripod legs were. Then I packed up, carried the equipment to the car, and went home to wait it out.
I didn’t have long; my water broke in the early morning a week before my due date. I made the kids’ lunches, walked them to school as usual, and Larry went off to work. The pre-focused camera, tripod, and film were waiting in the car, so I drove to the hospital, hauling my leaking bulk, plus the equipment, down the corridors to the OB floor. More accustomed to seeing a woman in labor carrying a floral overnight bag, the nurse on duty jumped up to help me in.
I was uncomfortable and it took more time than it should for me to get the camera set up on the black marks, insert the film holder, and do a quick light-meter reading, taking into account the wall of sun-filled glass into which I would be shooting. At noon my redheaded nurse, Mrs. Fix, was supposed to leave for her thirty-minute lunch break, but she eyed me, lying under the view camera, blowing and glassy-eyed with pain, and announced that she was calling Larry and the doctor right then. To hell with lunch.
Larry got there first. I was in labor delirium by then, breathing fiercely and speechless with hard contractions. At 12:30 I saw Dr. Harralson’s white coat come flapping up the hill outside the windows and suddenly the room was filled with activity. Trying not to push, I signaled Larry to take the black slide out of the film holder and cock the shutter at the pre-set speed. He knew not to let the camera move an iota in that process, which is harder than you might think with shaking hands.
At 12:37 the baby crowned and I reached up to the camera, thinking, “Dammit, Lois Conner gave me a shutter release and if ever there was a time for one, this is it. How could I have forgotten it?”
But it wasn’t camera shake from my fitful finger on the shutter that made the resulting image not all that interesting. I had correctly figured that Dr. Harralson’s body would block the light from the windows so I’d have to use a slower shutter speed. Anticipating the likely light levels, I had calculated the aperture at f/4.5, wide-open, for a fifth of a second, and I was right.
But at such a slow speed, the barreling baby was blurred as she slid out.
The picture was a dud.
But… maybe not a total loss. Perhaps, in hindsight, it was the birth of the family pictures, breathing life into the notion that photographs, and sometimes good ones, could be made everywhere, even in the most seemingly commonplace or fraught moments. A few months later, I took what I think of as my first good family picture. It was of Jessie’s face, swollen with hives from insect bites, to which she is especially sensitive. This was the one I started with, when she showed up that afternoon:
Looking at this picture now, I realize it is just a continuation of the soft, gauzy still lifes of flower petals and chiffon I had been working on for years, except this one had a kid in it.
I had done some earlier abstracts of Emmett with the same idea, chiffon, flowers,
but, in the chiffony picture of Jessie, I sensed a new direction. I don’t know if I’m all that different from other people, but for me great artistic leaps forward are not accompanied by thunderclaps of recognition. In truth, they aren’t even usually great leaps. They are tentative toe testings accompanied by an ever-present whisper of doubt.
Despite that whisper, I went ahead and took another picture of Jessie that day, which I called “Damaged Child.”
As soon as I printed it, I noticed its kinship with the familiar Dorothea Lange picture “Damaged Child, Shacktown.”
In both, the girls have a look of battered defiance. Just in case anyone could miss it, I made sure that the title drove the comparison home.
As strange as it sounds, I found something comforting about this disturbing picture. Looking at the still-damp contact print, and then looking at Jessie, completely recovered and twirling around the house in her pink tutu, I realized the image inoculated me to a possible reality that I might not henceforth have to suffer. Maybe this could be an escape from the manifold terrors of child rearing, an apotropaic protection: stare them straight in the face but at a remove—on paper, in a photograph.
With the camera, I began to take on disease and accidents of every kind, magnifying common impetigo into leprosy, skin wrinkles into whip marks, simple bruises into hemorrhagic fever. Even when a scary situation turned out benign, I replayed it for the camera with the worst possible outcome, as if to put the quietus on its ever reoccurring.
Once at about age five, Jessie took a mind to hop across the creek on the big rocks with which we’d dammed it, and walk the half mile or so to Emmett’s school. I was a pretty vigilant mother and had glanced out the window to see her, just a moment before, playing with her doll Maria on the tire swing, but suddenly I looked down at the bottomland and… no Jessie. Being the hysteric and fatalist that I am, I went into full panic mode, calling and running up and down the creek banks. By this time, Jessie was long gone, carefully looking both ways as she carried Maria across the nearby street on her way to Waddell School. I called the neighbors and my friends, and pretty soon we had a group of searchers fanning out into the woods. I stuck to the creek edge, certain I’d see a flash of gingham, of white sock and patent leather Mary Janes in the water.
Before long, the school secretary showed up with a beaming Jessie, and I sank into the bone-deep exhaustion of relief. The next day I set up the camera, cajoled seven-year-old Emmett into putting on a dress, and made this picture, almost too awful to look at, even now. I called it “The Day Jessie Got Lost” and I prayed it would protect us from any such sight, ever.
In fact, it didn’t.
A short time later, on a hot afternoon in early September 1987, I walked to the road at the top of our driveway to meet Emmett, who was on his way home from playing with a friend. That crossing was then especially busy because of nearby construction, and I always went up there to help the kids get across. An idling bulldozer blocked my sightline, but I spotted Emmett as he approached the road where a flagman was holding back oncoming traffic. Emmett paused on the other side of the street by the bulldozer.
The noise it was making was such that I couldn’t yell to him to wait, so instead I held up my hand, palm forward, in the universal “stop” sign. Not schooled in international hand gestures, Emmett mistook it for a “come to me in a hurry” sign and did just that. A second before he sprang forward, the flagman signaled the impatiently waiting cars to come ahead. The first car in the queue was a 1970s Chevelle, a heavy, powerful car driven by a seventeen-year-old who was only too willing to oblige the flagman’s command. He didn’t exactly gun it, but he wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to show the workmen lining both sides of the road what his car could do.
The poor kid couldn’t possibly have braked to avoid Emmett, who had leapt out from his side of the road, his happy eyes on mine. The car, going about thirty-five miles per hour, caught him midleap. Emmett’s head slammed into the hood and he was catapulted more than forty feet, where he lay crumpled and bleeding in the middle of the road.
Of course nobody had cell phones then, but even if they had, everyone who witnessed this seemed frozen in place. I screamed for someone to call the rescue squad, and no one moved, so I ran back down to the house and did it myself, worrying that while I was gone another car might hit Emmett. Then I ran back up the driveway and down along the forty-seven feet of skid marks to the splayed figure in the road.
I have said many times that the image of Emmett lying there is burned in my mind, but that is not true. In fact, I can’t tell you what he was weari
ng without consulting the photographs I took later in the hospital or even exactly how he had fallen. I remember lying in the sticky tar, I remember seeing the figures of the workmen in their hard hats standing on the hill above us, silent like a herd of curious bovines, and I remember knowing not to move the body. I also remember that I thought about photography in the eleven minutes it took for the first-aid crew to arrive.
When they did, Emmett was semiconscious, and when he was asked what his name was he spelled it out in a steady voice: E-M-M-E-T-T.
A glimmer of hope.
A few days after the accident came a knock on my door. Several of the workmen were standing there, yellow hard hats tucked under their elbows, one with a rose wrapped in cellophane from a convenience store. They stammered out their condolences and I then realized that they thought Emmett was dead from the minute they saw him hit. How could he not have been? That was why they never moved.
I thought he was dead, too. Seeing the Chevelle a few days later only reinforced the miracle of his survival. The still-shaken kid who had hit him drove the car over to our house and to demonstate the toughness of its metal suggested that Larry hit the hood as hard as he could. So Larry summoned up all his blacksmithing muscles and slammed his fist into the hood. Nothing.
Where Emmett had hit was a stomach-turning, head-sized dent.
After having made that dent and been catapulted down the road, Emmett, other than some vomiting and general pain, was found to be unharmed and was released from the hospital after just a few days. It is generally thought that what saved his life was that he was in midleap, airborne when he was hit, but who knows? To me, and I am sure to all of those who saw it, it is still inexplicable.
So in those eleven minutes, what was it about photography that I was thinking? Here’s what I wrote to a friend a month later, in October 1987:
But now, the real image of Emmett lying in a pool of blood has come to make the family pictures seem, ummm, trivial to me.
I lay there certain that his life was ebbing from his unconscious form and thought about… the real meaning of photographing my children. About whether I actually could have brought myself to photograph what is now so horribly burned into my mind. About what kind of photographer I really am… who exhorts her students to “photograph what is important to you, what is closest to you, photograph the great events of your life, and let your photography live with your reality” but who is paralyzed by that very reality. I actually wondered as I lay there, with my dying son, (or so I thought) if I could even hold a camera up. And, of course, there was no way. I am just not that kind of photographer.
I thought during that eleven-minute eternity that the world of motherhood is a far more complex thing than you and I ever imagined when we plunged so willingly into it, and that the fear and… joy I have encountered have staggered me.
How I love those children.
And how much I fear for them. And how real those fears can become, in just an instant. Right before my eyes, even, my horrified eyes. And, what’s worse is that I had imagined that scene, imagined it countless, terrible times and shaken myself out of it.
That is what those photographs were and now, of course, I am afraid of them. Afraid that by photographing my fears I might be closer to actually seeing them, not the other way round. Irrational, I know, but Emmett’s accident has turned a woman who lived on the edge into one who slips periodically into the depths and is only retrieved by a thread.
So, I have reached some sort of emotional impasse, I suppose, with these pictures. These last few weeks the new ones are suffused with the late summer light and they are gentler, more Southern, perhaps. I know all this will pass and that the image of him will stop arising, unbidden, to my mind and that the photographs will work themselves out. But it often is quite hard to reconcile one’s work with one’s life, isn’t it?
I had tried to exorcise the trauma of the experience by following my own commandment to “photograph what is important, what is closest to you, photograph the great events of your life.” I had taken my view camera into the hospital the night of the accident, but got nothing special there.
Then, a few weeks later I tried to make a photograph of the way Emmett looked when he was hit, or the way I felt he looked.
No go.
Emmett was completely recovered within a week, but I was still grievously wounded. I couldn’t shake from my memory the image of his sunlit, smiling face as he sprang toward me. And each time it came to me, I would suffer the sickening realization of the inevitable, the unstoppable that played out in that interminable split second. I would wake gasping and weeping from dreams, my concrete legs refusing the bidding of my panicked brain, horrified eyes turned to marble.
I tried a self-portrait. Another loser.
At the farm, the honeyed September light and the lazy, limpid river offered, as always, the cure, the balm for my bunged-up soul. At the farm, there is no reason for photography-as-inoculation, no fear and no danger. Just the land and the river and the sheltering cliffs, the comfort of the colossal trees.
Still, and not surprisingly, I concentrated on Emmett.
In each of these three pictures I saw something I liked: in the first, the solitary figure of the boy, in the next, the rush of water, made satiny by the slow shutter speed, and in the third, the V of the sky and the river.
Terrier that I am, at least in the pursuit of an elusive picture, I set out to marry all those features in one image, hauling the 8 × 10 camera and heavy tripod out into the river, slipping on the rocks, buffeted by the current, to set up in the riffling water at the lower rapids. I somehow managed to cut out the sky part of the picture in the next try, but still saw the potential for a good image.
Maybe lose the snorkel, I decided.
Now that I was on the scent, I was obsessed with getting this damn picture right. Day after day that balmy September I carried the camera and one film holder to the middle of the river across the mossy rocks. The water was waist-deep where I set up for the picture, with treacherous drop-offs into dark, fishy holes. After shooting the two sheets of film in each holder, I would swim, the holder high above my head, and get another, while dear, patient Emmett waited. I had six film holders, so we’d generally take twelve negatives each day—and most of them were failures.
They failed in many ways, sometimes because my wet fingers ruined the film, once when I dropped the film holder in the river, once because a flotilla of canoes came through, but usually because of dumb compositional mistakes on my part.
In this one he’s too far out of the water,
then here there’s too much light on the trees behind him, plus he’s too far back, but I liked the satiny water.
Off-center here and don’t like those clouds, or his hair.
Damn light-meter strap in the way here:
But now we’re getting closer, got the hands right, still too far out of the water and the light is too bright behind him…
Okay, the hands are almost right here, but an awkward stance, still not a keeper.
Then, eureka.
Seven different days we had tried, maybe eight—but I knew we had it at last. No one was more relieved than Emmett, who had given up all those afternoons to the demands of the light—and of his mother. Children cannot be forced to make pictures like these: mine gave them to me. Every picture represents a gesture of such generosity and faith that I, in turn, felt obliged to repay them by making the best, most enduring images that I could. The children, picture after picture, had given of themselves when the dark slide was pulled, firing off a deadly accurate look into the lens; a glare, a squinty-eyed look, a sad expression, whatever I asked for, as professional as any actor. And in many cases, they did this while hot, hungry, tired, or, like Emmett, shaking with cold.
It was not unreasonable when he announced that it was the last damn time he would model in the freezing river (by then it was October), and for some reason I titled the picture “The Last Time Emmett Modeled Nude,” althou
gh I knew the nudity was completely beside the point. That certainly came back to bite me in the ass.
Not every picture required this Herculean kind of effort, but more than a few did. When I sensed that a good picture lurked just beyond my range of vision, I went after it with dogged intent. I’d get a whiff of a good one in an odd snapshotty picture, like this one of Virginia about to dive off the cliffs,
and after considerable effort and multiple tries, finally got it right:
That’s the way many of these pictures evolved, their genesis in a failed image but one that had some rudiment of the eternal in it—like the hair plastered across the ribs, or the V of sky and river with Emmett.
But others came completely spontaneously; the camera was almost always set up off to the side and when something interesting happened, I would ask for everyone to hold still, maybe quickly tweak something, and then shoot.
I wrote about it in a letter back then:
You wait for your eye to sort of “turn on,” for the elements to fall into place and that ineffable rush to occur, a feeling of exultation when you look through that ground glass, counting ever so slowly, clenching teeth and whispering to Jessie to holdstillholdstillholdstill and just knowing that it will be good, that it is true. Like the one true sentence that Hemingway writes about in A Moveable Feast, that incubating purity and grace that happens, sometimes, when all the parts come together.