What else is there to see in a photograph that’s been talked about so endlessly you can picture it in your mind? This week, a month after the release of Sally Mann’s extraordinary artist’s memoir, Hold Still, and 23 years after the initial publication of Immediate Family, arrives an expanded, paper edition of the book that catapulted her career into the realm of critically lauded and publicly debated celebrity. You know the photographs, or you know of them: the practically rhapsodic images of her three children during carefree summers spent in remote corners of their Virginia farm, in the woods, down by the river; dreamy and idyllic even in their most searing moments, the “iconic picture on the cover of the three children standing there, glaring out at the world,” as Mann has described it; or streaked with dirt and blood and swollen with bug bites, the small accidents of play. All were made on a view camera in black-and-white film and luminously printed (Mann was one of the country’s foremost darkroom printers back then and still prints her work), but what has threatened to eclipse the images themselves are not the thousand words they’re supposedly worth, but the thousands and thousands of words that have been written about them since by detractors who could not get past the fact that the children were sometimes shown wearing little or no clothes.
In her memoir, Mann thoughtfully addresses the controversy, and the aftermath, from the legitimately creepy stalkers the photos drew to the FBI agent who encouraged her to believe in her own work, assuring her that there are people who “get aroused by shoes, too. I don’t think there is anything you can take a picture of that doesn’t arouse somebody.” The children, as children from a very early age instinctively understand the difference between “real” and “pretend,” got it, they were active participants. But for the literal-minded adults of the world, Mann makes a clear distinction between the real-life Jessie, Emmett, and Virginia, and her representations of them: “The fact is,” Mann writes of the pictures, “that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. . . . These are not my children with ice in their veins, these are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.”
Even as her sales rose, Mann drew fire from Richard B. Woodward in The New York Times Magazine in an article with the seemingly incongruous headline “The Disturbing Photography of Sally Mann”; from Raymond Sokolov in The Wall Street Journal, which ludicrously placed black bars crossing out parts of her daughter Virginia’s body; from feminist author Mary Gordon. Last month Terry Gross devoted nearly half of her Fresh Air interview with Mann to quizzing her about the alleged “eroticizing” of her children. (Mann to Gross: “Well, I guess that’s the key word. I mean, I don’t feel they’re eroticized, so we can agree to disagree on that, I guess.”) It was a shame that their conversation left little time to address the rest of the book, which is lyrical and fascinating and revealing on a number of levels, vividly recounting Mann’s “near-feral” childhood on the same land where she would later photograph her children; her rebellious boarding school years and her first photographs, falling in love and an early, bohemian-rural married life, the tragic murder-suicide of her husband’s parents, stories of her family and the African-American nurse who largely raised her, her close friendships with artists like Cy Twombly, her deep attachment to the South and her frank consideration of its troubled, racist history (she is forever haunted by the death of Emmett Till).
One of the most compelling, and perhaps surprising, threads of the book is Mann’s belief that photographs destroy actual memory. “I am convinced that the reason I can remember him so clearly and in such detail is because I have so few pictures of him,” she writes of Twombly. “When we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished.”
While a photograph can diminish a memory by replacing it with an image, it can also invoke a larger memory through the power of suggestion. There are, I think, two kinds of iconic photographs: the one so resonant it becomes the mind’s default image of a place and time, be it Marilyn Monroe standing over the subway grate with her dress blowing up around her; the first walk on the moon; the Viet Cong prisoner shot on the street in Saigon. Then there is the iconic photograph that so masterfully captures a time and place that it exists outside of those realms. Universal, symbolic, even mythic, it allows the viewer to fully enter the photograph, to project their own experience into the world it depicts.
When Mann refers to her own photographs as iconic, that’s what she’s talking about. It’s that which makes the experience of her photographs most remarkable, seen fresh, and it’s that which allows them to loom larger than the words once attached to them. That river may be in Virginia, but it could be anywhere; it may have been the late eighties, but these could be from any era, really—the clothes (and there are clothes more often than not) echo the eighties in one photograph, recall Dorothea Lange in the next. And the photos may show Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia Mann, but they are just as much of Sally Mann and her own childhood self. They could be, after all, just as much of mine.
As a child in North Carolina, around the same time that Sally Mann’s kids were roaming their Virginia woods, my sister and our four best friends spent half the summer slipping through the neighbors’ backyards, cutting a path down to a winding creek. We climbed through the ravine and waded the streams, we collected fallen branches and sticks and made forts and makeshift bridges; we concocted elaborate games of pretend, casting ourselves in character; single-file, we walked through a dark, echoey tunnel that cut underneath a highway and fed into the river. It didn’t matter what we were wearing, or if we were wearing anything at all, because we had escaped the reach of our parents; there was no one to see us. Lords of the flies, we were free. When I think of those afternoons now, I see them in color and in black-and-white; I see them as an all-girl version of Stand By Me, of Bridge to Terabithia, of Justine Kurland’s runaway girl photographs, and, yes, of Sally Mann’s Immediate Family. And I superimpose images from books and movies and pictures because I have no visual record beyond what I can conjure in my head.
“Did I reassess the pictures?” Mann said on Fresh Air. “Did I wish I could snatch them back and bundle them back into the film boxes and never have put them out? Not really.” Looking at Immediate Family again now, I am glad. Not because that means I have pictures of her children, but because that means I have a picture of myself.
