I was not familiar with the photographer Sally Mann or her work before I picked up this "Memoir with Photographs" from a featured book table at Powell's Books. I was attracted by the way she used photos in the text, commenting on them directly rather than just using them as illustrations. For example, she talks about (and illustrates) how as a little girl she insisted on running around naked until one day her mother told her she had to wear clothes if she wanted to hang out with the carpenters building a cabin on their property; turn the page and there's a photograph of young Sally with the carpenters, wearing just a pair of underpants.
Mann covers a lot of ground: biographical stories from both sides of her family, descriptions of her working methods, consideration of the complicated legacy of the South, rumination on the meaning of art. Her writing style is conversational, with unpredictable and seemingly casual transitions between subject. Her tone is calmly rational even when discussing lurid or charged subjects such as murder-suicide, the exploitation of photographic models, racial relations, escaped convicts, and decomposition.
I loved the chapter where she described her quest to capture an image of her son Emmett in the river that runs through their property. She wanted to "exorcise the trauma" of a recent accident that had nearly killed him. She tried several approaches before coming to the river. She saw something she liked in each of the first three pictures she took, then started in pursuit of a picture that combined all of those virtues. They spent hours there, with Emmett getting colder and colder. The chapter covers her artistic motivation, her aesthetic search, her tenacious process, and the questionable demands she put on her model (and child).
I was also impressed with the forthright way she addresses the "contradictions" of the South: "the gracious splendor of its lost world founded on a monstrous crime... elucidated in an accent and vernacular that are lyrical like no other."
Down here, you can't throw a dead cat without hitting an older, well-off white person raised by a black woman, and every damn one of them will earnestly insist that a reciprocal and equal form of love was exchanged between them. ... I am one of those. ... Only now am I wondering about these things. How did she get something as simple as her groceries? She had no car; she worked for us six days a week from eight in the morning to eight at night and her house was on top of grocery-less Diamond Hill. ... What were any of us thinking? Why did we never ask the questions? That's the mystery of it––our blindness and our silence.
The penultimate chapter is the astonishing story of the University of Tennessee's Anthropology Research Facility, popularly known as the Body Farm. They lay donated bodies on the property and study how they decompose. It's an interesting subject that also sheds light on Mann's unusual preoccupation with death (inherited from her father).
No comments:
Post a Comment