Sally Mann's "Southern Landscapes"

Sally Mann’s Southern Landscapes

This body of work is called Southern Landscapes the series includes photographs of landscapes in West Virginia where Sally Mann, the artist, was born and raised.  The landscape photographs were taken over a period of about eight years in the 1990s. Sally Mann takes most of her photos in West Virginia; many are taken at or around her house. Sally Mann is very attached to her home and state where she had grown up and raised and watched her children grow up as well, the state of West Virginia. She usually only takes pictures in her home state and around her home in Lexington West Virginia.

Mann’s first popular work included artistically laid out portraits of her family.  This is what made her such a well-known artist. This particular piece of work, Southern Landscapes, was never shown in its own exhibition but many of her other works have.

This body of work shows the landscapes in a different way than we are used to seeing them.  The images bring out the eeriness and death in the landscapes, which would normally be thought of as beautiful.  When I think of landscapes I think of large open spaces with a horizon line two-thirds up the page or two thirds down. Sally Mann’s landscapes do not all necessarily have a horizon line; Her images have a glow to them which I think makes them look like there was fog everyday that she took the pictures.  I like this because it adds to the overall eerie and death feel in the picture.  An image that I think of when I think of her images is the image taken in 1998 (number 12 on her website), it looks like it could have been a graveyard from a horror movie; it has the fog, the dead trees and the soft focus makes everything unclear and questionable.

The prints are black and white; they have a shallow depth of and have a soft focus to them like the images in the pastoralist movement.  Although, they have a soft focus some of the textures are very clear and are in focus. There is a border like edge going around the image, this border is black and has soft edges, and the border rounds the corners of the photograph.  The reason for this border is not because she puts it there but because the images were taken with a bellows camera. This camera puts this border around images because of the round lens.  Using this old camera and process caused imperfections on many of her photos. Sally Mann says that she actually likes these marks and damages that the process causes, it adds character to the image and makes each one unique. I am not sure about the size of her images but I do know that because of the process in which she prints the final images, the prints, will come out similar to the size of the negatives.   The way she prints her photographs is in a darkroom.  She takes a darkroom with her wherever she goes, much like the traveling photographers in the late 1800s lots of the negatives she develops are processed right in the back of her car.  Not in this work but in her more recent works sally Mann has been printing daguerreotypes as her method of printing images.

Most of the photographs in this body of work are similar to the photographs from the pastoralist movement, they are soft focus and have a painting like look to them but, at the same time parts of each image are very sharp like some of the artists and photographers from group F64.  And image that comes to mind is the image labeled 1996 (number 13 on her website), this image is mostly soft focus except for the vines on the tree, that particular part of this photograph reminds my of Edward Weston’s photograph of the Paper. I think the ideas behind her works are more like modernist photography in that she was taking a picture to take a picture, in other words, it was photography about photography rather than photography to tell us something. They did end up looking very painterly but that was not the original idea behind it.  Her paragraphs were also pre-visualized she set everything up around the subject and she knew what she wanted it to look like before she took the picture. The process is one from the 1850s similar to the collotypes types it is processed in a darkroom just like they did in the 1850s.

I do not think this body of work had a certain message or idea behind it, I think she just went out to takes a series of pictures.  However, whether Mann meant to or not, her photos did reveal a couple things about her.  This series starts to show us her obsession with death, the fact that she is able to take a beautiful landscape and turn it into a place that looks deathly.  In her works that follow more and more of her obsession is revealed to us; she takes pictures of the bones of her dead dog, and she goes to a graveyard and takes pictures of the dead people.  These landscapes also show us her attachment to child hood; all of her pictures were taken around where she grew up, and where her children grew up.  Sally Mann grew up with big open spaces to live and play so, naturally, she would want to capture those memories in her photographs.  Landscapes are free open spaces; it is nice that Mann took pictures of places she could relate to.

            Sally Mann is one of my favorite photographers, I can relate to her work and the process she uses, she has inspired me in some way for most of my pieces whether I am taking pictures of my family or just developing an ordinary picture in the darkroom.  Lots of her images relate back to her obsession with death and I think that is why mine do as well because I get most of my ideas from looking at her work.

Links:

http://sallymann.com/selected-works/southern-landscapes (Sally Mann’s Website)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNEd93H4pPY (part 1 of her movie What Remains)