by Sally Mann
And these pictures have come quickly, in a rush… like some urgent bodily demand. They have been obvious, they have been right there to be taken, almost like celestial gifts.
Gifts, indeed. Many pictures came to me in that lucky rush of exultation, the ones for which I had time to shoot only one, one sheet of film, those where I sank to my knees after shakily replacing the dark slide, eyes shut tight in thanksgiving and fear, fear that I’d screw it up in the developer, fear that the fraction of a second I saw was not the one on film, and in exhaustion, too, from the breath-bated moment, a tenth of a second with the expansive, vertiginous properties of Nabokovian timelessness, while before me the brilliant angel no longer radiant with the sun snatches up the towel and heads to the beach, the tomatoes are imperfectly carved up for supper, and my heart, my pounding heart, sends from my core the bright strength for me to rise.
8
Ubi Amor, Ibi Oculus Est
Remember that the file for the Mann murder-suicide was not deep in cold-case storage at the New Canaan police station? And that after thirty-five years it was sitting out on the desk in the records office when I asked for a copy? Wonder why? It’s a strange story that speaks to the hazards of public exposure, which in turn illustrates what ultimately was for me the most chilling aspect of showing and publishing the family pictures.
In 2010 anonymous letters began arriving at a variety of places—mailboxes of art critics, museum and gallery directors, college presidents, art professors, book publishers, collectors, newspaper offices, and, to the point of this particular narrative, the chief of the New Canaan Police Department, the head of the state police, and the attorney general of Connecticut.
The letters raved, in varying degrees of readability, that I had made my career by appropriating the work of an underappreciated and unnamed Virginia artist and that I was a fraud, a liar, a thief, and a murderer. Almost all were postmarked Richmond, Virginia, and typed on a computer, including the address labels. At first they were merely an annoyance to me and to those who received them, but as years went by and it grew clear they came from a committed and possibly deranged stalker, I became alarmed.
Various law enforcement authorities in Connecticut were also alarmed. Here is one of the letters they received, with redundant passages excised:
This letter is concerning the July 1977 case of Dr. Warren Mann and his wife Rose-Marie Mann in New Canaan, CT that was listed as a murder-suicide. I have come across some recent information that I believe is extremely important that could prove it was not a murder-suicide but indeed a double homicide. The culprits being Larry Mann the oldest son of Warren and Rose-Marie and Larry’s wife the controversial photographer Sally (Munger) Mann.
Someone needs to check if Larry Mann was born having Arthur as his middle name. Arthur is what he uses as his middle name and it makes sense considering his father was Warren Arthur Mann. If so, we need to ask the question what the “TE” stands for in Laurence TE Mann, one of his aliases.
Logically with Larry Mann being a philosophy major in college and with what happened to Warren and Rose-Marie Mann Larry is taking the TE Mann as Teman, grandson of Esau from the bible, a.k.a. descendent of Esau. Larry Mann is relating himself as Esau and his brother as Jacob.
One of Larry Mann’s other aliases Laurence A. Mannba a.k.a. Larry Mamba is a bold statement in itself. Esau was known to represent the hunter and bloodshed, he was the man known to have the love of violence and murder. Mamba—the deadly snake. Larry Mann, like his wife Sally, receives a natural buzz taunting the law to see how far he can go without being caught. The aliases would help him achieve this high.
If Sally’s father Dr. Robert Munger or any Munger was used as alibis for Sally and Larry Mann’s whereabouts at the time of Warren and Rose-Marie’s death it would be a drastic mistake.
Dr. Munger is known as the devil in human skin and he would do anything to help his daughter continue the chain of destruction to destroy anyone and anything of goodness. He was known to make his extra money as the abortionist in the area when it was illegal.
Sally Mann hates Catholics and tries to set them up anytime she can. Someone needs to check if Rose-Marie Mann grew up Catholic since Sally and Larry chose to set up Rose-Marie during the crime scene. There is some crucial reason they chose Rose-Marie.
Rose-Marie and Warren Mann have been deceased now for over 34 years. Rose-Marie is innocent and she cannot speak in her defense about what really happened that July of 1977. Sally Mann has finally made the mistake to prove that she and her husband Larry Mann were responsible for a double murder.
It is time to clear Rose-Marie’s name so she and her husband Warren can both rest in peace.
(The end of the letter noted that copies were sent to the FBI resident agency in Bridgeport, to the New Canaan police, to the Connecticut State Police, to various named public officials, and to a journalist at The Hour newspaper in Norwalk.)
Crazy as these letters seemed, the authorities who received them couldn’t ignore what they were claiming. Late in 2011, unbeknownst to us, the New Canaan police reopened the case of the murder-suicide of Warren and Rose Marie Mann. At the same time, a capable detective for the Rockbridge County Sheriff’s Department, Tim Hickman, began a local investigation into the origin of the letters, and proposed a long-shot request for help from the FBI at Quantico, Virginia.
The FBI has bigger fish to fry than a disgruntled would-be artist on a letter-writing campaign. It gets thousands of requests for help from local law enforcement nationwide and takes only a handful, so we were surprised when the Threat Assessment Unit agreed to meet Hickman at Quantico. They put several agents on the case and, together with Hickman, worked up a profile. It was a relief that they believed the immediate physical threat to me was minimal, but all the same the letters were getting crazier and more frequent. I worried when I appeared in public for speaking engagements or openings, and even found the seclusion of my life on the farm, which had always offered me protection and comfort, becoming a source of disquiet.
In the end, Hickman’s open ears and old-fashioned gumshoe investigation cracked the case. The fruit bat letter writer was exactly the person the FBI profile suggested she’d be: older with an unsuccessful artist-daughter who lived at home, but (the Threat Assessment Unit got this one wrong) she also had a history of instability and physical violence. Once local law enforcement and the FBI confronted and strenuously warned her off in spring of 2012, the letters stopped.
Even now, writing this a year later, I still feel vulnerable and exposed, and I am even more mistrustful of our culture’s cult of celebrity. Of the many unexpected repercussions surrounding the exhibition and publication of the family pictures, the widespread public attention and our seeming accessibility are still the most disturbing to me.
Looking back on that tumultuous decade, during which the skirmishes of the culture wars spilled into my territory, I have come to appreciate the dialog that took place, but at the time I occasionally felt that my soul had been exposed to critics who took pleasure in poking it with a stick. Many people expressed opinions, usually in earnest good faith but sometimes with rancor, about the pictures: my right to take them, especially my right as a mother, my state of emotional health, the implications for the children, and the pictures’ effect on the viewer. I was blindsided by the controversy, protected, I thought, by my relative obscurity and geographic isolation, and was initially unprepared to respond to it in any cogent way.
For starters, I didn’t realize the implications of allowing unfettered access to a journalist whose attentions I found flattering and whom I assumed to be a friend. Janet Malcolm wrote this wry assessment of the journalistic subject in her provocative book The Journalist and the Murderer:
Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day when their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses�
��the days of the interviews—are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.
I said yes when the journalist Rick Woodward called and I was astonished at the flash of the knife. But unlike the Aztec youth, I wasn’t expecting it; that’s how naïve I was. In my arrogance and certitude that everyone surely must see the work as I did, I left myself wide-open to journalism’s greatest hazard: quotes lacking context or the sense of irony or self-deprecating humor with which they had been delivered. During the two days of interviews, not exactly “wine and roses,” that resulted in a cover story for the New York Times Magazine, I was a sitting duck preening on her nest with not the least bit of concealment. So I can hardly fault Woodward for taking his shots at me.
He wrote me afterward that he had “dined out for months” on the story, and I’m sure he did. It generated a large amount of mail to the magazine, all of which the editor was kind enough to send me, although reading it caused me the same furious pain that the article had, and that it was essentially self-inflicted made it the worse.
My intern and I read all the letters and divided them up into three crude piles: For, Against, and What the Fuck?
The Against pile (thirty-three) beat the others out, but not by much. Despite what I thought of as Woodward’s unnecessarily heavy foot on the controversy throttle, nearly half were positive (twenty-eight), and not in the creepy way you might expect (an example of semi-creepy: “As an editor and publisher of a nudist related publication, I too am subject to public humiliation…”).
Here’s how the more negative, or in most cases, critical-but-trying-to-be-helpful, letters broke down:
Seven were from people who had either been abused as children or were themselves treating abused children. These were thoughtful, concerned, sometimes fraught letters. This opening sentence from a psychotherapist in Colorado is typical of the heightened feeling: “The cover article on Sally Mann stirred me greatly.” Several recounted the writers’ own painful life stories.
I went into therapy 14 months ago because of depression never thinking for one moment that there were incest issues in my past. After five months the horror of flash-backs and memories began. I was incested [sic] over and over and horribly tortured.
Much was made of the distinct personalities of my parents:
Her mother is described as having a sense of propriety; her father is described as being an aloof man and as having a sense of perversity. This contrasting parental style is regularly found in abusive families.…
She keeps a picture of her dead father in his bathrobe on her wall. Why a picture of him dead, why in his bathrobe, and why are the two combined?
All seven letters suggested that my father had abused me, and that I had repressed the memory and was unconsciously working out some kind of psychic pathology in my photographs. The then-popular theory that repressed childhood sexual abuse can remain susceptible to therapeutic recovery was, by 1992, beginning to wobble under scientific scrutiny (though you sure wouldn’t know it from the confident assertions in the Times mailbag). I had stupidly planted this repressed-memory idea by telling Woodward that I had very few memories of what was, basically, an unmemorable childhood, and that my father had taken “terrible art pictures” of me in the nude.
A particularly agitated letter from Staten Island, with a postscript apology for the correspondent’s “primitive method of handwriting,” queried me from page one:
“Was it really art, Ms. Mann, or was it covert incest?”
It was neither. Not incest, not art, and, it turns out, not even nudity. I have now organized and scanned all my father’s large-format negatives (as distinct from the casual snapshots he and my mother took) and am chagrined to report that they contain not a single nude photograph of me—an impressive feat of discretion on my father’s part, given how much time I spent naked as a kid. I have no idea why I said that to Woodward, and I’m resigned to present-day readers making what they will of the apparent fact that I falsely remembered being photographed nude.
But so be it. Their concerns that my “inner child” is “harboring deep reservations” and that the pictures “speak more about the photographer’s repressed memories of her own childhood than of her present relationship with her children” were misplaced. The facts are pedestrian and simple: what I had intended to convey to Woodward was that my pitifully few childhood memories were primarily based on photographs, and this was true.
And not just for me, either: I believe that photographs actually rob all of us of our memory. But having few childhood memories, and those being rooted in deckle-edged, curling snapshots, does not automatically qualify me for the repressed-memory club. If that were the case, nearly all the people my age would be spilling their guts on the couch about being “incested over and over again.” We’re not. We’re just admitting that we’re old, childhood was a long time ago, and we don’t remember all that much because our human brains find only certain things, and sometimes odd ones, worthy of encoding as long-term memories.
After the repressed-memories camp, the next-best represented was the ketchup lobby, spearheaded by a clinical social worker. I was taken to task for the most self-mocking, flippant, two-glasses-of-red-wine-into-it comment ever about ketchup, or, rather, about the kids’ use of it: “It’s common and I will not have common children.” Naturally, Woodward couldn’t resist quoting that, but we’ll skip the numerous letters of protest that begin earnestly with lines like “As a psychotherapist…” and continue to talk about, I swear, ketchup on fresh trout and my pretentiousness in setting the table with linen napkins in silver napkin rings.
The ones that stabbed me to the quick were the Bad Mother letters. If I was anything, I was a damned good mother, walking the razor-sharp line between being a “cool mom,” as Woodward described me, and being the old-fashioned mom who insisted on thank-you letters, proper grammar, good conversational skills, considerate behavior, and clean plates, no matter what was on them.
This is Jessie at 9:30 at night, still at the table after everyone else has gone to bed, sitting before a piece of flounder she refused to eat. I am not particularly proud of this moment, this clash of titanic stubbornnesses, but my children were the ones who would sit at our adult friends’ tables anywhere in the world, eating whatever was on their plates and engaging dinner companions in evolved and entertaining conversation. And, yes, without being asked, write a thank-you note. Ask anyone: they were fantastic kids.
I can easily imagine the outraged letter about this picture from some concerned social worker, fretting about squelching a child’s individual rights, or the power disparity between parent and child, or the abuse of trust or violation of bedtime hour or blah, blah, blah. I have the template for that complaint committed to memory from reading all the New York Times letters, many of which concluded as this one did:
Elizabeth [sic] Mann seems obsessed with situations which may prove disturbing to her children in a few years.… Time will tell whether and how much her children have been emotionally damaged by her photographs.
Even at the time, anguishing over these opinions and predictions, I knew that the crucial question for me as a mother was not whether the pictures were going to be respected in twenty years, but this all-important one: “I wonder how those poor, art-abused kids turned out.”
Although the pressure and confusion gauges often buried their needles in the critical red zone, I continued to take the pictures, and I continued, with the help of the kids’ patient, consistent, and loving father, to be the best mother I could be. The two roles were to a large extent kept separate. I walked the kids to school every morning and walked back to pick them up at three. I never forgot to sign the numberless permission slips and attended all their piano/flute/oboe/ballet recitals and soccer games. (Okay, so strictly speaking, that’s not true, says Virginia. She just jokingly reminded me that I missed the All Regional band performance in Covington when she gave her oboe solo. And
I bet there were some soccer games, too, but let’s just say I did the best I could under the circumstances.)
With Larry holding the flashlight, I picked pinworms from itchy butts with the rounded ends of bobby pins, changed wet sheets in the middle of the night, combed out head-lice nits, and mopped up vomit. I baked bread, hand-ground peanuts into butter, raised and froze vegetables and every morning packed lunches so healthy they had no takers in the grand swap-fest of the lunchroom.
I also made many mistakes, as parents do, and I went through some powerful and painful self-examination. But, all the same, the Bad Mother accusation just couldn’t stick, because taking those pictures was an act separate from mothering, and the kids knew the difference. When I stepped behind the camera, and they stepped in front of it, I was a photographer and they were actors and we were making a photograph together.
The Bad Mother letters usually raised the question of informed consent, but the kids were visually sophisticated, involved in setting the scene, and producing the desired effects for the images—and they were included in the editing of them. When the publication of Immediate Family was discussed, each child was given the possible pictures and asked to edit out any that he or she didn’t want published. Emmett, who was thirteen at the time, asked to exclude this picture from the book.
He, much younger, had been playing Bugs Bunny, and fell asleep still wearing the white legs of the rabbit. He was uncomfortable not because of the nudity, but because he said those socks made him look like a dork. It was a question of dignity.
That may have been the issue with Virginia’s edits as well. Like Emmett and Jessie, nudity per se was of little concern to her. She removed this picture, “Pissing in the Wind,” from the book possibilities, but, like Emmett, has given me permission to include it here.