by Sally Mann
Maintaining the dignity of my subjects has grown to be, over the years, an imperative in my work, both in the taking of the pictures and in the presentation of them. For example, as my father weakened with brain cancer, I tried to photograph him, in the manner of Richard Avedon or Jim Goldberg, whose work I admire.
But I put away my camera when I began to see that photographing his loss of dignity would cause him pain. (Once, after his death, I was asked what he had died of, and I replied, “Terminal pride.”) I did not take a picture on the day that Larry picked up my father in his arms and carried him like a child to the bathroom, both their faces anguished. To do so would have been crossing a line.
It’s hard to know just where to draw that stomach-roiling line, especially in those cases when the subject is willing to give so much. But how can they be so willing: is it fearlessness or naïveté? Those people who are unafraid to show themselves to the camera disarm me with the purity and innocence of their openness.
Larry, for example. Almost the first thing I did after I finally met Larry Mann in 1969 was to photograph him, and I haven’t stopped in the years since. At our age, past the prime of life, we are given to sinew and sag, and Larry bears, with his trademark stoicism, the further affliction of a late-onset muscular dystrophy. In recent years, when many of his major muscles have withered, he has allowed me to take pictures of his body that make me squirm with embarrassment for him. I called this project Proud Flesh.
While working on these pictures, I joined the thinly populated group of women who have looked unflinchingly at men, and who frequently have been punished for doing so. Remember poor Psyche, exiled by the gods for daring to lift the lantern that illuminated her sleeping lover, Cupid.
I can think of numberless male artists, from Bonnard to Weston to Stieglitz, who have photographed their lovers and spouses, but I am having trouble finding parallel examples among my sister photographers. The act of looking appraisingly at a man, studying his body and asking to photograph him, is a brazen venture for a woman; for a male photographer, these acts are commonplace, even expected.
It is a testament to Larry’s tremendous dignity and strength that he allowed me to take the pictures that I did. The gods might reasonably have slapped this particular lantern out of my raised hand, for before me lay a man as naked and vulnerable, and as beautiful, I assert, as Cupid. Rhetorically circumnavigate it any way you will, but the act of taking those pictures of him was ethically complex, freighted with issues of honesty, responsibility, power, and complicity. He knew that, because he is a sophisticated model, and he also knew that many of the pictures would come at the expense of his vanity.
To be able to take my pictures I have to look, all the time, at the people and places I care about. 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. And so it was with fire and ice, the studio woodstove insufficient to do him any good on the winter afternoons but with two fingers of bourbon to warm him, that Larry and I made these pictures: exploring what it means to grow older, to let the sunshine fall voluptuously on a still-beautiful form, to spend quiet afternoons together again. No phone, no kids, NPR tuned low, the smell of the chemicals, the two of us still in love, still at the work of making pictures that we hope will matter.
And it is because of the work, and the love, that these pictures I took don’t disturb Larry. Like our kids, he believes in the work we do and in confronting the truth and challenging convention. We all agree that a little discomfort is a small price to pay for that.
Prophetically, one New York Times letter writer predicted an outcome for my children that did, in fact, come to pass: a “third eye,” as this writer eloquently put it. By this she meant a shameful self-consciousness, a feeling of guilt and moral doubt about the pictures. And of the three, this most afflicted Virginia, my carefree, lissome river sprite.
That third eye was painfully drilled into Virginia’s nervous system by Raymond Sokolov, a food writer who wrote a confounding op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal in February 1991. He was knicker-twisted over government funding for art that the “non-art-going public” could find “degenerate” or in which a “line was crossed.”
This 1990 Aperture cover set him off, an image called “Virginia at Four.”
At a time when oceans of ink were being spilled on arts-funding controversies, Sokolov weighed in to observe, redundantly, that selective public funding is not the same thing as direct government censorship. As the government had neither funded nor censored my family work, its relevance to his argument was unclear. But Sokolov’s piece, a tissue of banality and non sequitur that otherwise would have gone unnoticed, acquired an undeniably arresting force on the page, thanks to the accompanying illustration (for which no permission had been sought by the Wall Street Journal). The nation’s largest-circulation newspaper cropped and mutilated my image as if it were Exhibit A in a child pornography prosecution.
When we saw it, it indeed felt like a mutilation, not only of the image but also of Virginia herself and of her innocence. It made her feel, for the first time, that there was something wrong not only with the pictures but with her body. Heartbreakingly, she wore her shorts and shirt into the bathtub the night after she had seen the picture with the black bars.
Of course, this excited art-aware lawyers, because the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 still had some teeth, and they were prepared to use them to take a bite out of the Journal. I was glad to hear from them, pissed at the cavalier attitude about censoring my work, and spoiling for a fight. But, as it became clear that Virginia, just six, would be up against such a powerful opponent, a David to their Goliath, we backed off. The thought of the depositions she would face and the likely tone of the questioning by the opposing attorneys were important factors in our decision. Virginia’s innocence was lost, and the third eye of shame was already in place. No need to blacken it.
We took her out to the pond up the road and tried to make a joke about it
but she was still upset and confused. Finally we suggested that she write Raymond Sokolov a letter, which she did:
After some legal pressure on Sokolov and the editor at the Journal, they both wrote letters of apology to Virginia. But the last sentence of the letter from the Journal editor, Daniel Henninger, was particularly galling:
The groups of people who often argue with each other about things like this would probably be better off if they gave each other something many people have forgotten called common courtesy.
How he thought this was an appropriate ending for a letter to a six-year-old, I cannot fathom.
The turmoil of that time was occasionally relieved by elements of humor, some of which were provided by the more oddball letters to the Times, in this case one that offered technical and compositional advice:
While I appreciated their sincerity, I paid about as much attention to the writers of the compositional complaints as I did to the ones that insisted that
Susan [sic] Mann’s pictures… are taking advantage of [the children] just as viciously as if she forced them to labor in a coal mine or a sweatshop factory for long hours at low wages.
or the one, mincing no words, that called me “the most vulgar person of the year.”
But I sat up and took notice of a few, for different reasons. For example, there was an inexcusably idiotic note from the writer Anne Bernays that brings up a familiar misapprehension about photography.
She writes in her assertive four-sentence letter that it’s not the nudity of the children that people find troubling but what’s on their faces: “They’re mean,” this total stranger to my children states with authority. “Mann has shown us children with ice in their veins; her kids give me the chills.”
How can a sentient person of the modern age mistake photography for reality? All perception is selection, and all photographs—no matter how objectively journalistic the photographer’s intent—exclude aspects
of the moment’s complexity. Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time’s continuum.
The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind, and shade. These are not my children with ice in their veins, these are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.
And if these kids give Ms. Bernays the chills in this picture,
then what about a different thirtieth of a second? This one, for example…
Now does she think they’re so mean? Is she bundled up against the chill?
Even the children understood this distinction. Once Jessie was trying on dresses to wear to an opening of the family pictures in New York. It was spring and one dress was sleeveless, but when Jessie raised her arms she realized that her chest was visible through the oversized armholes. When she tossed that dress aside, a friend of mine, watching the process, asked with some perplexity, “Jessie, I don’t get it. Why on earth would you care if someone can see your chest through the armholes when you are going to be in a room with a bunch of pictures that show that same bare chest?”
To which Jessie replied with equal perplexity at the friend’s ignorance: “Yes, but that is not my chest. Those are photographs.”
Exactly.
Let’s carry this a bit further. Not only was the distinction between the real children and the images difficult for people, but so also was the distinction between the images and their creator, whom some found immoral. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I believe my morality should have no bearing on the discussion of the pictures I made. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that I actually was, as some New York Times letter writers suggested, “manipulative,” “sick,” “twisted,” “vulgar.”
Even if I were all of those things, it should make no difference in the way the work is viewed, tempting as it is to make that moral connection. Do we deny the power of For Whom the Bell Tolls because its author was unspeakably cruel to his wives? Should we vilify Ezra Pound’s Cantos because of its author’s nutty political views? Does Gauguin’s abandoned family come to mind when you look at those Tahitian canvases? If we only revere works made by those with whom we’d happily have our granny share a train compartment, we will have a paucity of art.
Part of the artist’s job is to make the commonplace singular, to project a different interpretation onto the conventional. With the family pictures, I may have done some of that. In particular I think they tapped into some below-the-surface cultural unease about what it is to be a child, bringing into the dialog questions of innocence and threat and fear and sensuality and calling attention to the limitations of widely held views on childhood (and motherhood).
So, it is fair to criticize that ambition, that project, to argue that I’ve done my job clumsily or tastelessly, to tell me that I’m a maker of “badly composed frame[s] of an amateur home-movie,” as one letter writer did, or to wish to see restored the view of children as decorative cherubs with no inner lives of their own. But nowhere in that dialog about the work should my private character as the maker of the pictures be discussed. Nor, for that matter, should the personalities of the children, the actors and models, enter into the (metaphorical) picture.
By the same token, I was in no way personally obliged to answer my critics; to do so would have been beneath my dignity and that of the work. Happily, this stance was a luxury I could afford because the job of defending the pictures had been taken in hand by a number of impressive writers and thinkers, among them Anne Higonnet, Vince Aletti, Janet Malcolm, Katherine Dieckmann, and Luc Sante. Like Cy Twombly, I tried not to read what was written about my work, though occasionally a review or article would get floated past me, often with interpretations so rudderless, ill-rigged, and in every other way unseaworthy that I marveled they made it out of dry dock.
When Mary Gordon attacked my work in the summer of 1996 she went after my favorite image, “The Perfect Tomato” (see here), asserting,
The application of the word “tomato”—sexual slang for a desireable [sic] woman—to her daughter insists that we at least consider the child as a potential sexual partner. Not in the future but as she is. The fact that the children are posed by their mother, made to stand still, to HOLD THE POSE, belies the idea that these are natural acts—whatever natural may be.
I felt this required a response and replied:
It is a banal point that no artist can predict how each image will be received by each viewer, and that what is devoid of erotic meaning to one person is the stuff of another’s wildest fantasies. Mary Gordon seems to have these aplenty, but it is her retailing of lurid impressions of “The Perfect Tomato,” a photograph of unassailable purity, that elicits this rebuttal.
To back up her denunciation, Gordon homes in on the offending title. I am now informed that “tomato” is slang for a desirable woman among the hard-boiled gumshoes of certain faded detective novels (a meaning which the OED does not recognize). I cannot imagine that this sense is ever used today except in ironical allusion to that genre. Certainly I had no thought of it when I gave “The Perfect Tomato” its whimsical title, a nod to the only element in the picture that’s in focus. When I turned and saw my daughter dancing on the table that day I had no time to make adjustments, just ecstatically to swing my view camera around and get the exposure. There was no question of trying to retake the picture; it was, to pilfer a line from W. S. Merwin, “unrepeatable as a cloud.”
“The Perfect Tomato” is one of those miracle pictures in this series which preserve spontaneous moments from the flux of our lives. For other images, we replayed situations that had arisen—pace Gordon—“naturally” or within the evolving circumstances of a photo session.
Oscar Wilde, when attacked in a similar ad hominem way, insisted that it is senseless to speak of morality when discussing art, asserting that the hypocritical, prudish, and philistine English public, when unable to find the art in a work of art, instead looked for the man in it. But as much as I argued this same point on my side of the pond, other voices still insisted that, as a mother, the rules were different. This is a typical paragraph from a Times letter in which the complainant asserts a mother should not:
… troll the naked images of her children through waters teeming with pedophiles, molesters and serial killers. Sally Mann’s photos not only put her children at risk, but all the other children in Lexington, Virginia as well.
This got to me, too. All the other children of Lexington?
If ever there was a man who knows about “pedophiles, molesters and serial killers,” it is Kenneth Lanning, formerly a member of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Department. Fretting about this letter, I cold-called the department and lucked out by being referred to him. I asked if we could talk about these spectral, nightmarish figures and whether I should be concerned about them. I also hoped to get from him, in effect, a declaratory judgment as to whether my studio was going to be subject to the kind of ungentle attention that his agency paid to photographer Jock Sturges’s when they entered it in 1990, confiscating much of his work and precipitating a long, costly legal battle.
Sturges’s difficulties around the images made on a nude beach in France and the ongoing controversy around the work of Robert Mapplethorpe had made clear that we were in the throes of a full-scale moral freak-out over the photographic representation of nude children. Into this turbulent climate, I had put forth my family pictures. Although barely a quarter of them depicted a nude child, I was unfailingly described as the woman who made pictures of her naked children, an assertion that inflamed my critics, many of whom had never actually seen the work. I remarked then that I had trustingly sailed those images out like little boats onto rough seas and there was no fetching them back now to safe harbor.
Such was the innocence of the era tha
t I had only the vaguest notion that child pornography existed and had certainly never seen any. The World Wide Web didn’t cast itself over Rockbridge County until 1994, and even then most people didn’t have access to the Internet until 1997. Imagine that—like talking about a world without fire. My only experience with perverts had been as a kid, seeing the wet lips and open zipper of a man in the back of the Lyric Theater who gestured to me while I felt my way to the restrooms. When I called Ken Lanning, I had a lot to learn.
We went to see him at Quantico in April 1993. The kids were with us and got a tour of the place before he sat down to look at what I had brought, the entire series of family pictures to date. When he was finished he slowly gathered up the pile of 8 × 10 inch contact prints in a sheaf, tapped it against the table to even the edges, and looked over at us. He spoke at some length, a sad, too-knowing smile playing occasionally across his face. He said what I already knew: that some people would be aroused by these pictures. Then the smile, and he said, “But they get aroused by door handles, too. I don’t think there is anything you can take a picture of that doesn’t arouse somebody.”
He stressed that in his profession, context and perception were all-important, and I remarked, somewhat wryly, that they were all-important in mine as well. I certainly knew that the context of place was important in my family pictures, but I also knew that I was creating work in which critical and emotional perception can easily shift. All too often, nudity, even that of children, is mistaken for sexuality, and images are mistaken for actions. All contact is not necessarily sexual, all looking is not transgression, and of course appearances can deceive.