Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  The image of the child is especially subject to that kind of perceptual dislocation; children are not just the innocents that we expect them to be. They are also wise, angry, jaded, skeptical, mean, manipulative, brooding, and devilishly deceitful. “Find me an uncomplicated child, Pyle,” challenged the journalist Thomas Fowler in The Quiet American, adding, “When we are young we are a jungle of complications. We simplify as we get older.” But in a culture so deeply invested in a cult of childhood innocence, we are understandably reluctant to acknowledge these discordant aspects, or, as I found out, even fictionalized depictions of them.

  Another shape-shifter is desire—there is sexual desire but there is also maternal desire, marrow-deep and stronger than death. When the doctor handed Emmett to me, tallowy and streaked with blood, it was the first time I’d ever really held a baby, and here he was, the flesh of my flesh. I was gobsmacked by my babies: their smell, the doughy smoothness of their skin, the paper-thin pulse of fontanel. I loved the whole sensual package with a ferocious intensity. Yes, it was a physical desire, a parental carnality, even a kind of primal parental eroticism, but to confuse it with what we call sexuality, inter-adult sexual relations, is a category error.

  In the pictures of my children I celebrated the maternal passion their bodies inspired in me—how could I not?—and never thought of them sexually or in a sexual context, remarking to Rick Woodward, “I think childhood sexuality is an oxymoron.” I did not mean my children were not sexual; all living creatures are sexual on some level. But when I saw their bodies, and photographed them, I never thought of them as being sexual; I thought of them as being simply, miraculously, and sensuously beautiful.

  Once the work was out in the world, I was puzzled why that sensuous beauty should be signposted as controversial while at the same time magazine pages were filled with prurient images of young girls, all aimed at selling commercial products. From the pile of complimentary Times letters, four spoke directly to this distinction:

  After closing the magazine to ponder the cover photograph, I then reopened it to page two, a Revlon Ad, and was confronted with photos more offensive than anything I read or saw in the Sally Mann article. Why should there be an uproar over a woman who portrays her children nude in an artistic medium, while no one bats an eye at the pages packed with semi-clad models prancing and pouting, exploiting their sexuality for commercial purposes?

  Ken Lanning understood and noted the difference between the images of my children’s bodies and those of the pornographers or of the profane consumer culture. That day in Quantico, he reassured me on some points but cautioned me on others: no, law enforcement wasn’t coming after me, he said, but I was in for a rough time nevertheless.

  He was right on both counts.

  While Lanning seemed to think it unlikely that serial murderers and molesters were coming for the children of Lexington, or even just mine, it seemed to me that we were in some jeopardy. When we published Immediate Family in 1992, my expectation was that it would be received rather like At Twelve (1988)—with some modest attention, selling its small press run over the next decade mostly to the photography community. That’s not what happened. Within three months the first printing of 10,000 sold out and we were reprinting, a sales pattern that continued.

  Suddenly I was overwhelmed with mail, faxes, phone calls, and strangers knocking at my door. Not even living in little Chitlin’ Switch protected us. During those first two years I received 347 pieces of fan mail, much of it addressed simply “Sally Mann, Lexington, VA.” These fan letters came with photographs, of course, but also books, journal pages, handmade clothing, thirty-five preserved butterflies, jewelry, hand lotions, porcupine quills, Christmas tree lights, shark’s teeth, recipes, paintings, a preserved bird, mummified cats, chocolate chip cookies, and a hand-painted statue of the Virgin Mary with a toothy demon on a leash.

  Except for those that went straight into the weirdo file, I answered them all. Often I wrote on the back of failed or unwashed prints, a practice I regret now when I find them offered on eBay, and the more I answered, the more letters came. I was reminded of someone, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, I think, who, when asked by a reporter if he got a lot of fan mail, responded with something like, “Not nearly as much as I did when I answered it.”

  There were some letters with troubling return addresses citing inmate numbers in correctional institutions and some that gave off an indefinably creepy vibe. But the creepiest stuff of all, and the cause of the fear and surveillance that I mentioned in the letter to Maria at the beginning of chapter seven, were the six years of fantasy, supplication, and menace issuing from the computer of one obsessive who lived in an adjoining state. This man was our worst fear come true, troubling our waking and sleeping hours for years; to this day, despite the fact that he has moved overseas (where he has a job teaching children), our daughter Virginia reports nightmares about him.

  Using sometimes his real name, more often a transparent alias, and occasionally posing as an author researching a self-help manual for “recovering pedophiles,” this guy, like the fruit bat letter writer at the beginning of this chapter, began his assault with an epistolary carpet-bombing of editors and journalists. But his were not letters of complaint; more worryingly, they asked questions about the kids.

  Many recipients tossed these letters into the trash, but other people, alarmed, forwarded them to us. This creep was tireless: he wrote to journalists, curators, and editors asking for unpublished gossip, and to the kids’ schools, asking (repeatedly) for assignments, yearbooks, grades, contest entries, and artwork. When he received no response from the schools, he got a local man to try his luck at getting the material.

  A suspicious clerk was on duty at the medical records department in the local hospital when our stalker’s official-sounding request for the children’s birth certificates came in; fortunately, she called me about it. Subscribing to the local papers to scan them for our names, he would taunt us with his knowledge of ballet recitals, school honor rolls, and lunch menus. Once he sent registered-mail letters to the kids, and I had a friend sign for them, not wanting him to have even a signature.

  Those who received his outpourings were regularly informed of his being “bedridden with love sickness for the Mann children,” of his desire to receive “a blessing from the Mann family’s holy presence,” and of his resentment of us “for stealing my piece of the pie, so I hoped somehow to steal it back from them.”

  For years, I was sleepless with fears of Lindbergh baby–like abductions, and made sure that the windows were locked, that the house was always occupied, the children accompanied by an adult, and that the police made extra turns around the block. Of course I contacted Ken Lanning, who gave me advice but who was limited in what he could do, as were private protection agencies. A psychiatrist who read the letters suggested purchasing a box of rhino shells for the shotgun and a policeman concurred, reminding me to be sure to drag the body thus dispatched over the threshold and into the house.

  The cumulative effect of this creepiness was, paradoxically, almost to make our stalker the family member he claimed he wanted to be. Though I didn’t carry Larry’s picture in my wallet, I started carrying this man’s, and would watch for him with something close to the ardor of a lover, checking cars, peering down dimly lit library stacks, scanning the audiences at public appearances for an ordinary face that thousands of faces resemble. In a 1994 letter to the attorney, writer, and activist Andrew Vachss, I characterized the experience this way:

  A curious phenomenon has occurred in this stalking process: We almost feel as though this guy is a member of the family. He is mentioned more frequently than many blood kin, and his presence is felt in every aspect of our cautious lives. We anticipate his next move with the fierce watchfulness of passion, albeit a warped one.

  This strange familiarity, in a peculiar twist of the familiar adage, breeds not contempt but a kind of acceptance. We live routinely now with a hitherto unendurable amount of stress. Eac
h time it ratchets upwards, we adapt to it. In accommodating it, we normalize it.

  This is probably a familiar experience for anyone who has been stalked but I find our practical assimilation of him and his needs unsettling.

  This is the first time I’ve publicly referred, in any detail, to the shadow this weirdo cast for so many years. I knew of course that it would only validate those critics who said I put my children at risk. And it will make their vengeful day when I admit now that they were in some measure correct. Unwittingly, ignorantly, I made pictures I thought I could control, pictures made within the prelapsarian protection of the farm, those cliffs, the impassable road, the embracing river.

  That’s the critical thing about the family pictures: they were only possible because of the farm, the place. America now hardly has such a thing as privacy, at least not of the kind we had at the cabin. For miles in all directions, there was not a breathing soul. When we were on the farm we were isolated, not just by geography but by the primitive living conditions: no electricity, no running water, and, of course, no computer, no phone.

  How natural was it, in that situation, to allow our children to run naked? Or, put another way, how bizarre would it have been to insist on bathing suits for their river play, which began after breakfast and often continued long after dark, when all three would dive like sleek otters for glow sticks thrown in the pool under the still-warm cliffs?

  They spent their summers in the embrace of those cliffs, protected by distance, time, and our belief that the world was a safe place. The pictures I made of them there flowed from that belief and that ignorance and, at the time, seemed as natural as the river itself. But they unquestionably changed our lives, and I am asked many times if I would make them again, knowing what I know now.

  And, what do I know, exactly? Here’s a memory refresher from the letters:

  That some people feel the children could not have understood the implications of the work, could not have made a mature decision about their participation.

  That some people find photographs of naked children inherently problematic.

  That they arouse some pedophiles.

  That some people who see them experience uncomfortable transport to a childhood both Edenic and shadowed by menace, a childhood they may or may not have experienced in their actual past.

  That some people think the very act of taking the pictures was transgressive.

  That the wide distribution of the pictures could make my children into minor celebrities or targets for predators.

  That I was risking social censure and legal action.

  That publishing the images would lead some people to try to tarnish the privacy and innocence that allowed the imagery to be made in the first place.

  On that last one, they were right.

  When the spotlight of celebrity, which seems to shine more brightly in America than anywhere else, directed its beam on our family, it brought all those issues, heretofore unexamined, into bright relief. Viewers who knew nothing about us interpreted our lives, and the images were scrutinized under the mantle of scholarship or god-haunted righteousness.

  The candy cigarette here was just a candy cigarette, not a metaphor for a life on the streets. Jessie’s vamping was just that, not a predictor of future pathology, Virginia’s back turned to the camera did not mean anything except that it was easier to yell at Emmett that way, and the stilts in the background were just stilts, not phallic symbols. All these interpretations of this fictionalized fraction of a second have been posited, as have many more, sometimes to our amusement and sometimes to our distress.

  The writer Lee Smith, who once had a New York copy editor query in the margin of her manuscript “Double-wide what?” tells a perfectly marvelous, spot-on story about Eudora Welty when she came to Hollins College, where Smith was a student. Welty read a short story in which one female character presents another with a marble cake. In the back of the audience Smith noted a group of leather-elbowed, goatee-sporting PhD candidates, all of whom were getting pretty excited. One started waving his hand as soon as she stopped reading and said, “Miz Welty, how did you come up with that powerful symbol of the marble cake, with the feminine and masculine, the yin and the yang, the Freudian and the Jungian all mixed together like that?”

  Smith reported that Welty looked at him from the lectern without saying anything for a while. Finally she replied mildly, “Well, you see, it’s a recipe that’s been in my family for some time.”

  As critics, journalists, and the curious public bore down on our family, we began to understand that our family recipe was not from the cookbook of mainstream America. The ingredients in our work were exotic and the instructions complex.

  But, in the end, as our own marble cake has emerged, swirled with dark confusion and light with angel food transcendence, the answer is Yes. Yes, and yes, resoundingly, absolutely, we would do it all over knowing what we know now.

  As ephemeral as our footprints were in the sand along the river, so also were those moments of childhood caught in the photographs. And so will be our family itself, our marriage, the children who enriched it, and the love that has carried us through so much. All this will be gone. What we hope will remain are these pictures telling our brief story, but what will last, beyond all of it, is the place.

  PART II

  My Mother: Memory of a Memory Past

  9

  A Sentimental Welshman

  When I get asked what one piece of advice I have for young photographers, this is what I tell them: if you are working on a project, and you’re thinking maybe it’s time to put it out into the world, make sure you have already started your next body of work. Not just started, either: you should be well along on it. You will know that the first project is finished when you find yourself joylessly going through the motions to eke out a few more pictures while, like a forbidden lover, the new ones call seductively to you. This new lover should be irresistible, and when it calls, you will be in its urgent thrall, making the work of your heart.

  Toward the end of the decade-long family pictures project, that call came. I responded to it by taking pictures so warm and ingratiatingly likable, so unwearied by alienation, so lacking in the chilly elegance that frosted over art at the time, that I was certain I’d be pilloried for them. How could such emotional pictures, fetched out from the back rooms of my heart’s rag-and-bone shop and given sincere expression—no trace of irony or ambiguity—not excite the scorn and condescension of worldly viewers?

  A curator friend remarked that the other work he was seeing in the art galleries in 1997 was like a palate cleanser for the sweetmeats served up in my Mother Land show of that year. These pictures, taken in Virginia and Georgia, were as creamy and rich as the food from the region they celebrated. And with the impudence of beauty, they were unapologetic about it.

  Where did the impulse to make this work come from? After those knotty family pictures, out of what genetic tapestry did these threads emerge, weaving their unconscious sentimentality into the new design?

  Surprisingly, they didn’t come from my father’s family of colorful southern eccentrics, even though their family seat, Arlington, a well-known tourist attraction in Birmingham, had provided the setting for bodice-ripper novels like this one:

  No, it wasn’t from my father’s side. Those strands of genetic sentiment came from my decidedly unsentimental Boston-born mother, whose ancestral past turned out to be hiding plenty of its own bodice-ripping. Until a few years ago, I knew almost nothing about her family background beyond the fact, revealed to me while studying seventh-grade history, that a paper in the safe-deposit box certified my mother as a Mayflower descendant.

  That Mayflower ancestor was John Howland, a “lustie yonge man” who, according to Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, was swept overboard but managed to hang on to a dangling line long enough to be pulled to safety. Reading about him, I marvel at the contingency of my own existence, dependent here on the strength of a seventeenth-cent
ury piece of woven rope.

  But no less marvelous is the strength of the genetic threads that, woven together, explain those romantic artistic tendencies otherwise unaccounted for by my personality or upbringing. These threads I have followed with all the diligence and groping optimism of a mythic hero, and with as many dramatic discoveries. I began this Knossian epic by cutting, one by one, the strings securing the boxes that I had hauled back from the nursing home after my mother died.

  As if eager to spill their guts, they spewed before me letters, journals, account books, ships’ manifests, stopped watches, menus, calendars, pressed flowers, scribbled love notes, telegrams, a ring from which the jewel had been crudely torn, dance cards, photographs, and newspaper clippings, all stashed away without system or order. For the hot half of the year, I bent into the angle of the attic eave and sifted through this wholly unsuspected, revelatory, and peculiar new past.

  All my life I have had people tell me how wonderful my mother is—or, now that she is dead, was: how charming, witty, generous, beautiful, and smart. Smiling, I would agree with them, nodding my head, while the inside version of it shook side to side, silently rejoining, “Well, yeah, but that’s because she isn’t your mother.”

  But lately, disconcertingly, I have begun to think that maybe they were right. Certainly they were right about her being beautiful: that nobody disputes.

  But I have come to think they were more right than I knew about the rest of it, too. This postmortem readjustment is one that many of us have had to make when our parents die. The parental door against which we have spent a lifetime pushing finally gives way, and we lurch forward, unprepared and disbelieving, into the rest of our lives.