Interview: Sally Mann about family photos and the truth

June 08, 2018

Interview: Sally Mann about family photos and the truth

Sally Mann is an American photographer from Lexington, Virginia — there she was born in 1951 and there she lives now.

Mann is especially interested in photography’s antique technology. She has been using a bellows camera for a long time and has explored platinum and bromoil printing. Later she began using a very difficult wet plate collodion process, which made her pictures look even more mystical.

Working in different genres, Sally's best known for her b&w intimate portraits of her family.

An extract of a conversation between

Sally Mann and Jiang Rong

You said that when you were young, your father told you there are three avenues for artistic expression: sex, death, and whimsy. It seems to me that you have taken his advice and started to explore the subject of sex first.

Yeats said that the only two compelling subjects are sex and death, but I don’t really agree with that. I don’t think either At Twelve or The Immediate Family have much to do with sex.

But sex isn’t the same as pornography. I think your works were more about the children’s awareness of their gender. So gender may be a better word than sex.

I agree, but there is so much more to The Immediate Family than just gender. I photographed my children almost every day. I wanted them to look natural and not posed. By contrast, the pictures in At Twelve were always very carefully posed.

Why?

Because I don’t live with those children. I had to make an appointment with them to go to their homes and photograph them. So they were all posed.

Once, when talking about using a large-format camera to capture fleeting moments, you said that the best photos in The Immediate Family are the ones that look effortless, just like 35mm snapshots. How did you achieve those effects?

My kids were so complicit and tuned in to how photography works. They were basically actors and were willing to work with this lengthy time frame. They were so relaxed and comfortable in front of the camera. Like the image of Virginia leaning back on Larry’s lap.

And like the one taken on Easter day, in which Jessie is showing off her new dress.

That image was carefully staged. I had to ask someone to hold the dog and then let it go, and Jessie had to spread her dress out like that probably ten times. But with each exposure she did it with genuine ease and grace.

You also said that sometimes it felt like the touch of an Angel when you managed to get graceful pictures.

No kidding, even though it may sound too poetic. It felt magical when we got the very best pictures. Like The Perfect Tomato. I mean, how lucky were we that Virginia was making that little expression just as Jessie was stepping down into the light. That was just a miracle.

The Perfect Tomato

You once said that you hope the Immediate Family pictures “tell truths, but truths ‘told slant’”—just as Emily Dickinson put it. What did you mean by truths “told slant” in the context of your photos?

I mean that they are not told in a mendacious way, but told with a little bit of an edge, or perhaps a “punctum” that catches your gaze. I wanted to tell a story with a hook that catches you and holds you. You could take a flat picture as opposed to a slanted picture, but then it would just be a fact, like “here is a child wearing an Easter dress”. But you have to make the image interesting—complex and peculiar. For example, the dog running in the Easter picture: is that a dangerous dog or a wolf? Why is it running? And why does that man gesture that way? I want my pictures to make people think and question, even if it upsets them.

Do you think there is any conflict between staging and telling the truth?

What is the truth in photography? It can be told in a hundred different ways. Every thirtieth of a second when the shutter snaps, it’s capturing a different piece of information.

But you once said that you wanted to “invoke and illuminate the most difficult truths”. So my question is about whether it’s possible to get the truth at all.

I think truth is a layered phenomenon. There are many truths that accumulate and build up. I am trying to peel back and explore these rich layers of truth. All truths are difficult to reach.