by Sally Mann
The early success I enjoyed in this new project gave me a false sense that not only would the good pictures come easily, but also that I understood my reasons for doing them in the first place. In general, I am past taking pictures for the sake of seeing how things look in a photograph, although sometimes, for fun, I still do that. These days I am more interested in photographing things either to understand what they mean in my life or to illustrate a concept. This work with black men, though inchoate and not yet even printed, seems to be a little bit of both.
The Platonic doctrine of recollection asserts that we do not learn but rather, with time and penetrating inquiry, release the comprehensive knowledge that came bundled with us at birth. In this concept, we each hold within ourselves “the other” by virtue of our shared humanity, with artists (in theory) being uniquely qualified to transcend their own identity and gain access to the unknown other through empathy and imagination.
Plato notwithstanding, it asks a lot of empathy and imagination both, not to mention photography itself, to help me understand my relationship with the black people in my life and to come to grips with the physicality of slavery. William Styron was accused of indulging in what Hegel called the “psychology of the valet” for his ambitious attempt as a white man to tell, in a detailed and personal way, a black man’s story in The Confessions of Nat Turner. That criticism is specious: I think his Platonic pool of universal experience was all too happy to yield him the mysteries of history and human nature when he tapped into it. I hope that when I drill down to search my own soul’s reserves, I might enjoy even a fraction of his access.
To compound the overall difficulty of tapping those reserves, I have established a rather stringent conceptual framework in making these pictures. Almost all my models are strangers, most know nothing about me as a photographer, and each session is limited to about an hour. When they walk into my funky-ass studio, miles from nowhere, they are guarded and suspicious; how could they not be? Who is this gray-haired old gumboil in her silverwear—clothes covered with silver nitrate stains—and what kind of pictures does she want? Not some quasi-sexual-stud bullshit, they hope, but they always couch it more diplomatically. The historically dishonest and slippery social ground upon which our brief friendships struggle for a foothold makes every emotion, every gesture, suspect.
In the more elastic medium of writing, even Faulkner couldn’t, as Vincent Harding put it, enter “starkly white” into the mind of Dilsey, a purely fictional character in The Sound and the Fury. How then can I expect to introduce myself to a living stranger of another race, generation, and sex, then establish a relationship of trust, communicate my uncommunicable needs, reconcile four hundred years of racial conflict, and make a good picture all in one session?
In 2009, on the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, the choreographer Bill T. Jones was commissioned to make a dance about him. Characteristically, Jones chose to relate Lincoln’s legacy to the racial and social complexities that continue to haunt us today. In his dance/theater piece Fondly Do We Hope… Fervently Do We Pray, he addresses with movement and words our nation’s history of slavery, but in a video about making it he acknowledged the doubts that haunted him:
Who wants to talk about slavery, no matter how lyrical the terms, who really wants to talk about it?… What will the vocabulary be… how do I use the abstraction of arms and legs?
And sometime later, speaking with Bill Moyers, he said:
To go back to slavery seems beside the point. But I think there was something… in what you said about it being about the body… the body is the thing that… connects us, the body is bought and sold, and the body is definitely the thing that will divide us. And slavery is the most horrible example of it. And it’s simply abstraction… it is nothing more than an abstract gesture, heated up in the crucible of our association. It’s useful for people to do that exercise. See something horrible through a formal lens.
The formal lens through which Jones chose to focus his examination was Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric.” Among the many gifts of sensuality, unasked-for and risky, given to American letters by Whitman, this poem stands out for the intimately carnal language with which he describes the realities of a slave auction. Whitman and Jones, each through his own medium, sought the person inside the auction-block property, speaking about slaves as human beings, about their humanity, about, to get right down to it, their physical bodies. It’s the body that’s being offered for sale, bought and sold. It’s the body that divides us, the body that gives value to the “product.” Using song, dance, and Whitman’s words, Jones heated up the crucible of our association, and I borrowed the idea, using the poem as a template for my own exploration:
Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears,
Eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids,
Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-hinges,
Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition,
Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-slue,
Strong shoulders, manly beard, scapula, hind-shoulders, and the ample side-round of the chest,
Upper-arm, armpit, elbow-socket, lower-arm, arm-sinews, arm-bones,
Wrist and wrist-joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-joints, finger-nails,
Broad breast-front, curling hair of the breast, breast-bone, breast-side,
Ribs, belly, backbone, joints of the backbone,
Hips, hip-sockets, hip-strength, inward and outward round, man-balls, man-root,
Strong set of thighs, well carrying the trunk above,
Leg fibres, knee, knee-pan, upper-leg, under-leg,
Ankles, instep, foot-ball, toes, toe-joints, the heel;
All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body…
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!
These pictures are not a voyeuristic inventory of my models’ physical properties. When asked what I am doing these days, I hesitate before responding, “I am photographing black men,” because all too often the response has been, “Oh, like Mapplethorpe!”
No, not like Mapplethorpe. Not at all like Mapplethorpe.
What I want to do is find out who those black men were that I encountered in my childhood, men that I never really saw, never really knew, except through Gee-Gee’s eyes or the perspective of a racist society. It’s an odd endeavor, and the remarkable thing is that my models are willing to let me try. They are helping me find the human being within the stylized, memory-inflected, racially edged, and often-inaccurate historical burden I carry. The heartrending irony is that some of that burden was given me, out of fear and concern, by Gee-Gee.
Edification and understanding can be a felicitous outcome in the making of these pictures, possibly as much a part of the art as the end product, the image and print. Because of the clear, self-imposed parameters, this work could be seen as a form of performance art: an intense period during which the relationship that obtains between sitter and photographer both informs and becomes the art. Our different ages and gender deepen the transaction, but the social constructs of race, culture, age, background, and life experience contribute to the Gordian nature of the knotty moment. It is an intense time, probably for both of us, certainly for me.
I remember author Dorothy Allison saying once that if you don’t break out in a sweat of fear when you write, you have not gone far enough. I’m going that far. It is not fear that’s bringing on the sweats, exactly, but something else that has to do with the nature of photographic portraiture and why, since the 1980s, I have hardly made a portrait of anyone outside of my immediate family.
I once read an interview with Richard Avedon in which he asserted that a photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed, and that what he does w
ith that knowledge is as much a part of the picture as what he chose to wear that day. Avedon felt that his models had control over the results, that they were performing for the camera and implicated in what was taking place. Of course, he acknowledged that most of his models were professionals or public figures who knew exactly what the camera could do for them and to them. When pressed, he allowed that there were also those he called “the innocents, who have no idea what my agenda is, how or why or for what purpose I am photographing them and who are simply curious and at the same time generous with themselves.”
Because I do not photograph the famous, my models are often “the innocents,” and easy exploitation of their naïveté all too often results in good pictures. I think this is commonplace in photography throughout history. If you were to take a look, for example, at the contact sheet of the well-known Diane Arbus image of the boy holding a toy hand grenade in Central Park, you’d understand what I mean. But unfortunately, you can’t because the Arbus estate will only permit reproduction in art books devoted to Diane Arbus’s work (although, at the time of this writing, you can see the Arbus contact sheet reproduced many dozens of times by entering “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park” into Google). If it were reproduced here, this is what you’d see: eleven pictures on the twelve-image roll of a perfectly normal (if oddly dressed), knobby-kneed little boy standing arms akimbo and occasionally mugging for the camera. But your eye would go straight for the one in which for the briefest split second the exasperated child is shown spasmodically clenching his hands, one holding the grenade, and grimacing maniacally. This anomalous and life-altering split second in the life of the little boy is the one she chose, the one where he looks like a freak.
Of course she did. I would have, too.
The girl in this picture from my 1988 book At Twelve could not have known that her breast was visible from the vantage of my camera, but I did and took the picture anyway.
And I published it, because her face does not show, and because it is one of the best pictures in that collection.
How about this Edward Steichen image:
It depicts the robber baron J. Pierpont Morgan, who allowed Steichen a mere two minutes to make his portrait. How could Morgan have known that the arm on his chair was reflecting the light so that it appeared he was holding a dagger? Morgan was one of Avedon’s “professionals,” a public figure who had been photographed countless times. And yet the photographer held all the cards.
We always do. Exploitation lies at the root of every great portrait, and all of us know it. Even the simplest picture of another person is ethically complex, and the ambitious photographer, no matter how sincere, is compromised right from the git-go. There are nimble justifications for making potentially injurious imagery, some grounded in expediency and others cloaked with the familiar Faulknerian conceit: “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”
But most of us are not Keatsian in our talents, so does our lesser work deserve what my friend the writer Jim Lewis calls “Faulkner’s moral pass”? Lewis thinks not: “An asshole who makes great art is an asshole who makes great art; but an asshole who makes lousy art is just an asshole.” And one wonders if being the subject of “great art” takes the sting out of painful representation. Maybe it does; perhaps the sting diminishes over time, particularly as the importance of the art grows. For example, does Dora Maar’s discomfort over Picasso’s representation of her really matter at this point? Still, the fact remains that many, I daresay even most, good pictures of people come to one degree or another at the expense of the subject.
When I work with these men, my goals are primarily to establish such a level of trust as to attenuate, if only for that short time, our racial past. But, secondarily, I hope to convince the total stranger before me that this work will be aesthetically resonant in some universal way and worth the risk he takes in making himself so vulnerable.
It’s a tricky moment: taking the picture is an invasive act, a one-sided exercise of power, the implications of which, when considered in historical perspective, are unsettling. Photography is always invasive, but these experiences are consensual and, in the best hours, transcendent. I have had men, complete strangers, trust me enough to offer up physical characteristics about which they were sensitive—missing digits, scabby, eczema-ridden backs, surgical scars—with no prompting and no embarrassment in the quiet afternoon light of my studio deck.
We don’t speak much, but we both give, and take, something. At the most basic level, making these images is exploitive, reductive, and fraught. But at a higher level, which portraiture at its best can achieve, the results can also be transformative expressions of love, affirmation, and hope. If transgression is at the very heart of photographic portraiture, then the ideal outcome—beauty, communion, honesty, and empathy—mitigates the offense. Art can afford the kindest crucible of association, and within its ardent issue lies a grace that both transcends and tenders understanding.
But even if these image-making sessions can’t bridge the seemingly untraversable chasm of race in the American South, and of course they can’t, they still offer an oblique way for me to express my belated thanks to Hamoo, Smothers, and Ernestine’s nephew. These men, and many others, suffered the ignorance and arrogance of my youth, and reached across that divide when they needn’t have, gestures that required forbearance and courage that I was too blind to recognize at the time. Now, on my studio porch, I both reveal and invite vulnerability, gently, I hope, teasing open the doorway to trust, a doorway that leads from an immutable past to a future that neither Gee-Gee nor I would ever have imagined.
PART IV
My Father: Against the Current of Desire
17
The Munger System
My father always said he’d kill himself before debility took him, and he did. After a ruinous year of unsuccessful treatments for a malignant brain tumor, we shouldn’t have been surprised. Daddy had been waltzing with the cultural concepts of death since his youth, and I wonder if he hadn’t long ago memorized the steps to his own danse macabre. I’ve also wondered if the numerical echo between his birth and death dates might have determined his decision to swallow thirty Seconals on the particular day he did, May 22:
Robert Sylvester Munger
Born 11-22-11
Died 5-22-88
Parenthetically, I can envision the even more satisfying inscription on my own tombstone, should I be so palindromically correct as to die on January 5, 2015:
Sally Mann
Born 5-1-51
Died 1-5-15
While my father was the kind of man who might have been tempted by the prospect of this kind of memorial congruity, he actually intended to die the weekend before he did—at least my mother said so. The whole family was converging on May 13, and if he could pull off his death the next day, the reunion and farewell could be tidily wrapped up together.
But he couldn’t. Although it’s an intriguing notion, I doubt that the eight-day delay had anything to do with the aesthetics of numbers on his tombstone. I suspect that as he contemplated it, a much deeper shadow than we can know fell between the idea and its execution. Although it’s hard for me to imagine my father’s resolve ever letting him down, I think on May 14 it did.
And anyway, how did he think he could pull it off in a house full of people? I guess he planned to do it after everyone was asleep, moving unsteadily through the house to his study, softly shutting the door. Then, he would have brought out, from wherever he had kept it all those decades, the brown glass bottle of Seconal, its label yellowed with age and flaking onto the table. Maybe he even went so far as to count out the pills and pour a glass of water. Not too much water, though, because he would have been worried about his bladder releasing; too humiliating, even if he were dead.
Earlier that year, he had grown afraid that he might wet the bed and had cut back on his water consumption. He grew less luci
d and his thinking was screwball. Unaware of his fear of incontinence or of his dehydration, we thought he was dying. But a savvy hospice nurse, who knew him to be a man for whom adult diapers would be an unthinkable indignity, figured it out and made him drink. All the same, I bet that on May 14 it was a mere sherry glass of water he poured for those thirty pills, if he got that far.
Water or not, he didn’t kill himself that day, choosing instead to spend one last weekend with his family, even if it meant inconveniencing them by a return trip in the near future when he could get up his resolve.
For the next week, my father, the papery skin of his bare head raw and inflamed from radiation treatments, resumed his solitary station at the windows facing the Blue Ridge Mountains. He watched helplessly as the disappointed crows he had trained to come to him circled raucously above the house. I assume he was plotting the next best death day.
May 22 was a Sunday, and a close friend of mine, Ronald Winston, was flying down from New York to visit Daddy. When Ron and my father met a few years earlier, each recognized something of himself in the other: a gentle courtliness, a double-breasted-suit-wearing kind of rectitude, and a wide-ranging, fusty erudition—qualities that for a generation had been uncommon.