Introduction to the Exhibition - Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyEoRgZXI4I
Initial rough hewn thoughts. Learning that many of the images were staged, a collaborative working between mother and children, photographer and models. I am unsure why but I always feel a bit cheated when I learn that an image I had on first viewing assumed was the lucky capturing of a moment, was in fact a directed planned affair. I think that says more about my clearly deep held innocent desire to believe in what I am being presented rather than saying anything about a specific photographer.
I find the images from Immediate Family and her early southern landscapes personally most aesthetically pleasing, they draw me in, they resonate. Even on now learning that they are staged. It is the tones, the use of light to highlight certain aspects, to tell a certain tale, to impregnate with atmosphere. Heavy, dripping, humid.
Despite building on these same techniques which appealed to me so, her later images on the southern landscape and battle fields do not appeal in the same manner. The willing introduction of faults and flaws through both the processes employed and equipment used, to me personally, detract rather than add to the image. The levels of meaning and aesthetic beauty that Sarah Greenough is able to ascribe to some of the most abstract images in the Battlefields book of work, I am just unable to follow. The pied piper stopped playing for me at this point.
Sally Mann interview with Chinese Photography magazine.
"I am less interested in the facts of a picture than in the feelings. The facts don't have to be absolutely sharp. I can get information across by appealing to viewer's emotions"
"Images don't have to be big and heroic to pack a punch."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyEoRgZXI4I
Initial rough hewn thoughts. Learning that many of the images were staged, a collaborative working between mother and children, photographer and models. I am unsure why but I always feel a bit cheated when I learn that an image I had on first viewing assumed was the lucky capturing of a moment, was in fact a directed planned affair. I think that says more about my clearly deep held innocent desire to believe in what I am being presented rather than saying anything about a specific photographer.
I find the images from Immediate Family and her early southern landscapes personally most aesthetically pleasing, they draw me in, they resonate. Even on now learning that they are staged. It is the tones, the use of light to highlight certain aspects, to tell a certain tale, to impregnate with atmosphere. Heavy, dripping, humid.
Despite building on these same techniques which appealed to me so, her later images on the southern landscape and battle fields do not appeal in the same manner. The willing introduction of faults and flaws through both the processes employed and equipment used, to me personally, detract rather than add to the image. The levels of meaning and aesthetic beauty that Sarah Greenough is able to ascribe to some of the most abstract images in the Battlefields book of work, I am just unable to follow. The pied piper stopped playing for me at this point.
Sally Mann interview with Chinese Photography magazine.
"I am less interested in the facts of a picture than in the feelings. The facts don't have to be absolutely sharp. I can get information across by appealing to viewer's emotions"
"Images don't have to be big and heroic to pack a punch."