Sally Mann’s work is largely rooted deep in the soil and sky of her home state of Virginia.Sally Mann Images
Everyone's a photographer these digital days, it seems. Not Sally Mann, though. Or, to be more precise, she's not as much the photographer she feels she should be. On first hearing, this seems passing strange: Mann, after all, is, at 64, world-famous for her photography. Time magazine in 2001 called her "America's best photographer." Yet she feels out of touch.
"Things happen and my first instinct is not to pick up a camera," she acknowledged with a laugh the other day on the phone, while en route by car to Washington from Philadelphia. "I'm always the last person to be picking up a camera. Even now that I have this infernal iPhone, I'm not very good at taking all those pictures that everyone else seems to be taking." Indeed, "it's on my list of things to do in terms of betterment, self-betterment, relentless self-improvement: I want to take more snapshots. Really! It's become the human vernacular and I think I should be part of it." Which is why a digital Leica now awaits her attention at home, even as she admits that, when she thinks about "making serious pictures, I still think about the view camera."
Of course, no one is going to hold it against Mann if she fails to act on her populist instinct. While we know 1,000 point-and-shoot pictures of Mom in her kerchief and Dad in his cap, of Sis's high school graduation and Junior's bar mitzvah may charm family and friends, en masse they have little of the je ne sais quoi of any one of the 60 or so revelatory images in Mann's most famous book, 1992's Immediate Family, let alone whatever other Manns are nestled in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other prestige collections.
As Mann fans know, the artist (and her art) is rooted deep in the soil and sky, history and lore of southwestern Virginia and environs, especially that of Rockbridge County where she was born in 1951 to an artistically inclined, atheistic country-doctor father and a beautiful, emotionally constrained mother. Mann's still there, living alongside the "sweetly unassertive" Maury River near Lexington on a farm known as Boxerwood with her husband of 45 years, Larry. It was there the Manns raised their three now-grown children, Emmett, Jessie and Virginia, whom Sally granted a kind of pictorial immortality with her 8-by-10 view camera in Immediate Family. Or, as I punningly have come to call it, "Eye Mediate Family."
Mann's not seeing as much of the homestead as she'd like this month, however. Literary affairs have put her on the road, namely the publication of Hold Still, a handsome 500-page hardcover "memoir with pictures" of dogs and death, in-laws and outlaws, corpses and copses, that's already being hailed as "an instant classic." Mann, in fact, is in Toronto Friday evening at Ryerson University where she's being interviewed by Paul Roth, director of the Ryerson Image Centre, as part of the city's month-long Contact photography festival.
Funnily enough, for all the acclaim the memoir is enjoying, Mann already has been indicating that her debut foray into public publication could very well be her last. Clearly she's a fine writer; indeed, the memoir speaks powerfully of the impact of William Faulkner while reminding us that Mann was a dedicated poet, an Ezra Pound scholar and, in 1975, the recipient of an MA in creative writing from Hollins University in Roanoke, Va.
Mann says she's hesitant to publish again "because it just kicked my ass so badly to write this book. It took me twice as long as it would have taken you, I assure you, and it took such an intensity of effort. Photography has a sort of ebb and flow to it. But there's no ebb and flow to writing; it's just so constant and hard and … you sort of have to man-haul it out of your insides." Maybe there could be another book, she said. But raising the possibility now "is sort of like asking a woman who's just had a baby if she's going to have another one." For the time being, "I feel I've pretty much spilled my guts on this one."
Hold Still's origins go back to the summer of 2008 when Mann received a letter from Harvard University inviting her to give the 2011 Massey Lecture in the History of American Civilization, a call in previous years answered by the likes of Toni Morrison, Richard Rorty, Gore Vidal and Eudora Welty. "Speak about anything you want," was the only brief, and so, Mann observed, "I began looking for what I had to say where I usually find it: in what William Carlos Williams called 'the local.'" The result was a series of PowerPoint talks titled If Memory Serves.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, race informs much of Hold Still. Virginia, after all, was where the first African slaves were brought to what is now the United States in the early 17th century. And for the next 200-plus years, no Southern state exceeded Virginia in slave ownership or slave trading. Robert E. Lee was from Virginia; Virginia is home to Richmond, capital of the Confederacy. And like many relatively well-off whites in the state, Mann was largely raised by a black woman, Virginia Carter, known as Gee-Gee.
Mann devotes about 60 pages in Hold Still to "the matter of race," extolling the virtues of Gee-Gee and the love they shared. At the same time, she's unsparing in limning both her own and her family's complicity in passively propping up Virginia's Jim Crow regime. In recent years, Mann has taken to photographing African-American men, descendants of slaves, for a museum show likely to open in 2017 or 2018. Mann knows it's a fraught project, this attempt by an affluent Southern white woman to "visually articulate my sense of the unsettled accounts left" by the racist legacy of slavery. "I think it is going to raise a bunch of questions that nobody wants to talk about in this country," she said. And while "they're not all that complicated as pictures, there's a certain vulnerability about them, about the men in the pictures."
Thirty-eight years after her first exhibition, at Washington's Corcoran Gallery, Mann remains a rather vulnerable sort herself. Are there going to be any more great pictures in my life, she wonders. Is it over? "I can have, as I have actually, 50 rave reviews about something, and then if I get one little niggling bad review – or some complaint, or some less-than-glowing comment – man, I'll latch onto that and obsess over it and that's the only thing I'll remember. I am just so paralyzingly insecure, it's ridiculous. People," she said, "think I am making this up, but my family knows it's true. I'm always the glass-is-half-empty person."
Sally Mann appears Friday at 7 p.m. at the 340-seat Ryerson Library Lecture Theatre, 350 Victoria St., Toronto. Admission is free. The event will also be streamed live online (ryerson.ca/ric).