At the very end of this article from 1992 is a statement that points out some differences between then and now: Then, apparently, for many people childhood was still viewed as a time of "unalloyed sweetness and innocence", and Mann's photographs were a "welcome corrective. " I don't think many people are so naive about the reality of childhood nowadays.
--shannon June 5, 1992 Review/Art; Childhood Without Sweetness By CHARLES HAGENThe view of childhood offered by Sally Mann's disturbing and powerful black-and-white photographs, in a show entitled "Immediate Family," at the Houk Friedman Gallery, is anything but simple. Ms. Mann depicts her three children, along with occasional adults as supporting characters, in dramatic, psychologically fraught poses, often posed nude in scenes evoking a precocious sexuality that remains gilded with innocence.
In "Modest Child No. 1" (1990), for example, Ms. Mann's younger daughter, perhaps 5 or 6 years old, coyly covers her nipples with her hands while she gazes dreamily out of the frame. Other pictures feature a blend of domestic and lyrical elements. In one, a somewhat older girl dances nude in a shaft of sunlight on a picnic table, the blurry figures of other family members behind her.
The world of childhood that Ms. Mann presents in her pictures is both luminous and scary, rife with magic and ritual and suffused with complex, half-recognized emotions. At times the pictures depict overtly psychosexual dramas, as in a Jungian birth image of a boy lying in the shallow, glowing water of a narrow ditch dug into the edge of a swimming pond.
Other photographs are more upsetting in their evocation of sexual anguish, or even violence. One particularly shocking picture shows a nude preadolescent girl hanging by her hands from a metal hook on the deck of a summer home while adults sit nearby reading the newspaper, seemingly oblivious to her presence.
A number of Ms. Mann's photographs are marked by a degree of openness and intimacy that some viewers may find disconcerting. In one, the younger daughter is shown sleeping in the middle of a huge stain, as if she has wet her bed. But the child's peaceful pose, as well as the formal beauty of Ms. Mann's photograph, serve to counteract any sense of embarrassment that might be expected to go with the event.
At times, though, Ms. Mann seems to want to flaunt the troubling suggestions of her pictures. A close-up portrait of her older daughter with one eye swollen shut is entitled "Damaged Child." On one level this refers to a famous documentary photograph with the same title made by Dorothea Lange in 1936, which shows a girl dressed in rags and standing in a similar pose. Given current awareness of the problem of child abuse, Ms. Mann's title lends her photograph another meaning, suggesting that the girl may have been beaten. In fact, though, she had been sent home from school after being bitten by a gnat. In this and other pictures Ms. Mann plays with viewers' fears and expectations, making use of photography's ambiguity to challenge easy pieties about growing up.
Ms. Mann employs a variety of devices in shooting and printing her pictures to heighten their dramatic impact. These include using selective focus, darkening areas of the prints, and posing her children with significant props. In their dreamy theatricality as well as their evocation of the hermetic world of the family, Ms. Mann's pictures recall the stagy domestic dramas of the great 19th-century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. More immediately, they bring to mind the powerful pictures Emmet Gowin made of his wife and family in the late 1960's and early 70's.
At their best Ms. Mann's pictures seem to be both inside and outside the children, in effect externalizing what are essentially internal psychological processes. Ms. Mann makes even the overt theatricality of the photographs an inherent part of her vision of childhood, with several pictures showing children acting out adult roles, whether smoking candy cigarettes or wearing high heels and pushing a stroller.
Occasionally Ms. Mann's melodramatic, lushly printed pictures seem so overblown, so blatantly symbolic, that they don't ring true. This raises a crucial question about the work: to what extent is Ms. Mann projecting onto the children her own notions of the nature of childhood? A real strength of the photographs is that for the most part the actions they depict seem to have originated in the children themselves, with Ms. Mann simply augmenting their impact through her artistry.
Of course many people regard photographs of naked children as inherently exploitative and even pornographic, and will reject Ms. Mann's work on those grounds. Other viewers will bristle at the sensual, emotionally drenched nature of Ms. Mann's vision of childhood, and will object to her using children to act out the fantasies, some of them sexual, that are central to it. Still others, though, will find that vision in large measure accurate, and a welcome corrective to familiar notions of youth as a time of unalloyed sweetness and innocence.
Questions of this sort do not admit of easy answers. That fact, along with Ms. Mann's obvious intelligence and sensitivity, provides much of her work's unsettling power.
"Sally Mann: Immediate Family " will remain at the Houk Friedman Gallery, 1094 Madison Avenue, at 82d Street, in Manhattan, through June 27.
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