Let me be honest here: Sally Mann is my favorite photographer. I lived in Lexington, VA (Mann’s hometown) for about a year when I was 14, and that was it. That’s when I fell in love with photography – mostly due to my exposure to Sally Mann’s work. And that love inspired the life I have today – a professional career with a very honest and heavy arts focus, one that joyfully bleeds into my personal life.
So, that said, when I heard Sally Mann was debuting a new series of work at the Gagosian Gallery in September, I was incredibly excited. Sadly, I’ve not had any luck pitching the story to a print publication – so let me know if anyone’s interested, I’m available and eager! – but for now, I’ll more than happily talk about it here.
With “Proud Flesh,” Mann turns her camera away from her earlier subjects – childhood, adolescence, life and death, landscape, history – and considers the relationship between husband and wife, turning the tables on the traditionally male artist-dominated lover studies, with a series dedicated to her husband of almost 40 years, Larry Mann.
Mrs. Mann describes their relationship as “love at first sight.” Of note, Mr. Mann – a once strikingly powerful man, who, as told in one story, was capable of independently lifting a heavy stone three men together could not – was diagnosed in 1994 with muscular dystrophy, an incurable disease that has weakened his muscle tissue.
There has always been a palpable honesty to Mann’s work – sometimes haunting, often beautiful, sometimes intimidating, other times heartbreaking. Take, for example, the photographs she took of her children years ago for 1990′s “Immediate Family” (some of the most powerful portraits I’ve ever seen – see images below). These provoked controversy for their unflinching look at childhood in its entirety – curious, passionate, proud, peaceful, and, yes, sexual beings. Mrs. Mann does not shy away from the truth – she openly embraces it. And “Proud Flesh” is no exception.
As she describes it in a recent essay, “Rhetorically circumnavigate it any way you will, but exploitation lies at the root of every interaction between photographer and subject, even forty years into it. Larry and I both understand how ethically complex and potent the act of making photographs is, how freighted with issues of honesty, responsibility, power, and complicity, and how so many good images come at the expense of the sitter, in one way or another. These new images, we both knew, would come at his.”
“It is a testament to Larry’s tremendous dignity and strength that he allowed me to take the pictures that I did. The gods might reasonably have slapped this particular lantern out of my raised hand, for before me lay a man as naked and vulnerable as any wretch strung across the mythical, vulture-topped rock. At our ages, we are past the prime of life, given to sinew and sag, and Larry bears, with his trademark god-like nobility, the further affliction of a late-onset muscular dystrophy. That he was so willing is both heartbreaking and terrifying at once.”
WIth “Proud Flesh,” some of the ideas and emotions Mann’s focused on in past work converge: sexuality, strength and weakness, vulnerability and, so importantly, trust. Larry Mann is her husband and lover, yes, which provides a rich, new dimension; he’s also a man weakened by illness. This element cannot be ignored, and presents a different level of intimacy in Mann’s work.
Sally Mann writes,”Most of the pictures I take are of the things I love, the things that fascinate and compel me, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to look at or take … I look, all the time, at the people and places I care about, and I look with both ardor and frank, aesthetic, cold appraisal. And I look with the passions of both eye and heart, but in that ardent heart, there must also be a splinter of ice.”
“And so it was with fire and ice, the studio woodstove too far away from the light to do him any good on a cold winter afternoon, that Larry and I began this work of exploring what it means to grow older, to let the sunshine fall voluptuously on a still-beautiful form, and to spend quiet afternoons together again. No phone, no kids, two fingers of bourbon, the smell of the ether, the two of us—still in love, still at work.”
“Proud Flesh” opens September 15th at Gagosian’s 980 Madison gallery. Aperture is releasing a book of the same title in coordination.
All images courtesy of Gagosian.
For more info, visit Gagosian.com
For several images from Mann’s “Immediate Family” series, check out:
Plus, see a clip from “What Remains,” the 2006 documentary focused on Mann’s series of the same title:
And for an interesting interview with Sally Mann on Charlie Rose:
Check out my latest post at Behind the Burner to read about dining in style with Ali Siavoshi‘s playful lighting designs. This is art born of everyday objects many of us have around the house – wine glasses, hangers, umbrellas, and, as evidenced by “Hungry,” even cutlery.
Spanish photographer Jesús Madriñán takes everyday, commonplace moments, translating them into dreamlike sequences. As he says, “I tend to transform spaces and daily experiences with the use of light into oneiric realities.”
He goes on: “I think that the most basic, pure and clear art element is oneself; that is why I have always loved to take the intimacy and reality of each person, of a life, and turn it into art. In this way, I am working in series in which the characters are showed in a psychological way, always finding a relation between them and the space were they are.”
Madriñán invites the audience to complete the story lines he begins with his photos. He presents “lonely characters, melancholic but beautiful…A non-action that allows me to open doors to lots of meanings, by creating a cold environment and an anxious atmosphere, always thinking about the increasing loneliness of the contemporary human being. In some scenes [there] seems to be no danger, but drama or human emotion is being intensely lived inside the photographed character.”
Tim Burton. (American, b. 1958); Untitled (The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories); 1982–1984; Pen and ink, marker, and colored pencil on paper, 10 x 9\
Tim Burton; (American, b. 1958); Blue Girl with Wine. c. 1997; Oil on canvas, 28 x 22\
Throughout his career, Tim Burton has always pushed the cinematic envelope. This November, the Museum of Modern Art presents a major retrospective of his work. Tim Burton considers his evolution as both a director and concept artist for live-action and animated films, and as an artist, illustrator, photographer and writer. The show will trace Burton’s creative history, from his earliest childhood drawings through his mature work in film.
The exhibition will bring together over 700 examples of rarely or never-before-seen drawings, paintings, photographs, storyboards, moving-image works, puppets, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera, and include an extensive film series spanning Burton’s 27-year career. Artworks and objects will be drawn primarily from the artist’s personal archive, as well as studio archives and the private collections of Burton’s collaborators. His student films and early, nonprofessional films will also be on display. International and domestic posters from Burton’s films will be on display in the theater lobby galleries.
In conjunction with Tim Burton, MoMA presents The Lurid Beauty of Monsters, a series of films that influenced, inspired, and intrigued Burton. Taking as its starting point a screening of
horror movies that Burton organized in Burbank in 1977, the series includes such films as Jason
and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963), Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman, 1961), Nosferatu (F. W. Murnau, 1922), and Earthquake (Mark Robson, 1974), and will be screened from December 2, 2009 to April 26, 2010.
The show runs through April 2010.
Images courtesy of MoMA. For more info, visit www.moma.org
Innovative Norwegian photographer Sølve Sundsbø and creative studio Surface to Air have collaborated on a dramatic and beautiful, new limited-edition fashion collection. The collection will include three printed silk dresses, three printed silk tops and three bags, and will be available in September 2009 exclusively in the world’s top 20 fashion stores and
online at shop.artandcommerce.com.
For more info, visit artandcommerce.com
Images courtesy of Art + Commerce.
