Was Ever LoveArt Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition: ‘Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit’ at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

Exhibition dates: 13th November 2010 – 23rd January 2011

Many thankx to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Jessie #34' 2004 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Jessie #34
2004
Gelatin Silver enlargement print from 8 x 10 in. collodion wet-plate negative, with Soluvar matte varnish mixed with diatomaceous earth

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled (Still Life)' 2006 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled (Still Life)
2006
Ambrotype (unique collodion wet-plate positive on black glass), with sandarac varnish (15 x 13 in)

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled' 1983 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled
1983
Polaroid (8 x 10 in)

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled' 2000-2001 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled
2000-2001
Gelatin silver enlargement prints from 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4cm) collodion wet-plate negatives, with Soluvar matte varnish mixed with diatomaceous earth

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled-#4, Antietam' 2001 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled #4, Antietam
2001
Gelatin silver enlargement print from 8 x 10 in. collodion wet-plate

One of the first major presentations in the United States of the bold work of contemporary photographer Sally Mann opened at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website (VMFA) on November 13, 2010. Exclusive to Richmond, the exhibition will continue until January 23, 2011.

Focusing on the theme of the body, the exhibition will revolve around several entirely new series while also incorporating little-known early work. Mann is admired for her passionate use of photography to address issues of love and loss, expressed in images of her children and southern landscapes. Her recent work uses obsolete photographic methods and nearly abstract images to push the limits of her medium and to dig deeper into themes of mortality and vulnerability. The images include several powerful series of self-portraits – an entirely new subject in her work – and figure studies of her husband. Some of the works in the exhibition include nudity and other graphic material. Viewer and parental discretion is advised.

“Sally Mann is among the top tier of photographers today. Although she is widely exhibited, we are fortunate to be one of the first U.S. museums to produce a major exhibition of her work,” says John Ravenal, the exhibition curator and Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “The fearlessness, power and deeply emotional themes of her art are both captivating and unforgettable. We are pleased to exhibit one of Virginia’s, and the nation’s, finest artists.”

Self-examination, ageing, death, and decay are some of the subjects of the exhibition, and these are balanced by themes of beauty, love, trust, and the hopefulness of youth. Among the works are portraits of Mann’s husband, who suffers from a degenerative muscle disease. These are juxtaposed with colourful images of her children, forming a poignant comparison between youthful evanescence and the expressive capacity of the mature adult body.

Other works offer additional perspectives on the themes of ageing and mortality. Made during a trip to the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center, Mann’s “Body Farm” images explore her fascination with the thin line between animate and inanimate, form and matter. Multi-part self-portraits represent Mann’s first extended exploration of her own face as a subject. Two self-portrait pieces consist of multiple unique photographs printed on black glass – a format known as ambrotypes – arranged in monumental grids of Mann’s likeness.

“The focus on the body in the exhibition will offer a profound meditation on human experience,” continues Ravenal. “The sheer beauty, formal sophistication, and expressive power of the work is likely to appeal to art world and general audiences alike.”

For her landscapes, Mann developed the method she continues to use today, involving an antique large-format view camera and the laborious process of collodion wet-plate. This method, invented in the 1850s, uses sticky ether-based collodion poured on glass, which must be exposed and developed in a matter of minutes before it dries. Unlike her nineteenth-century predecessors, who strove for perfection, Mann embraces accident. Her approach produces spots, streaks, and scars, along with piercing focus in some areas and evaporation of the image in others. These distortions – “honest” artefacts of the process – add a profoundly emotional quality to Mann’s images.

Mann’s recent work continues to use this technique, but returns to the body as a principle subject after a decade of landscapes. Though the body has been an essential focus in Mann’s work from the beginning, this is the first time an exhibition and publication have explored it as a coherent theme.

Born in 1951, Sally Mann has played a leading role in contemporary photography for the past 25 years. Her career began in the 1970s and fully matured in the Culture Wars of the early 1990s, when photographs of her children became embroiled in national debates about family values. In the mid-1990s, Mann turned her attention to large-scale landscapes, specifically the evocative terrain of the South, where she was born, raised and continues to live. Her landscape work raised questions about history, memory and nostalgia, and also embraced a romantic beauty that proved as troubling to some critics as the sensual images of her children had to others. By the early 2000s, she had returned to figurative subjects, adding images of her husband and herself to her work.

Text from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled (Self Portraits)' 2006-2007 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled (Self Portraits)
2006-2007
Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass) with sandarac varnish

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled (Self Portraits)' 2006-2007 (detail)

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled (Self Portraits) (detail)
2006-2007
Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass) with sandarac varnish

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Untitled' 2007-2008 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Untitled
2007-2008
Ambrotypes (unique collodion wet-plate positives on black glass), with sandarac varnish

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Ponder Heart' 2009 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Ponder Heart
2009
Gelatin silver contact print from 15 x 13 1/2-in. collodion wet-plate negative

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Hephaestus' 2008 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Hephaestus
2008
Gelatin silver contact print from 15 x 13 1/2 –in. collodion wet-plate negative

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Was Ever Love' 2009 from the exhibition 'Sally Mann: The Flesh and the Spirit' at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Was Ever Love
2009
Gelatin silver contact print from 15 x 13 1/2 –in. collodion wet-plate negative

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
200 N. Boulevard
Richmond, Virginia USA
23220-4007

Opening hours:
Daily 10am – 5pm
Wed – Friday until 9pm

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website

LIKE ART BLART ON FACEBOOK

Back to top

Exhibition: ‘Proud Flesh’ by Sally Mann at Gagosian Gallery, New York

Exhibition dates: 15th September – 31st October, 2009

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Memory’s Truth
2008
Gelatin silver print
Contact print from a wet-plate collodion negative

“I can think of numberless males, from Bonnard to Callahan, who have photographed their lovers and spouses, but I am having trouble finding parallel examples among my sister photographers. The act of looking appraisingly at a man, making eye contact on the street, asking to photograph him, studying his body, has always been a brazen venture for a woman, though, for a man, these acts are commonplace, even expected.”

Sally Mann

Many thankx to Gagosian Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on some of the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Proud Flesh is for me an emotionally exhausting work about withering. It has elements of 19th century clinical photography done with absolute loving care for the subject. Its factual surface is quickly replaced by metaphor and the haze of imperfection from the wet-plate collodion negatives she employs. In a few of the images, due to the choice of striped bedding on which the figure lays, we might be looking at a historical photograph take from Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen. With Larry’s thin and seemingly weak legs dangling over the edge of a wooden cot, the soiled bedding following the contour of his legs, it is difficult for me to see this image without this harsh historical reference. The following image in the book, he is turned into a martyr – arms out stretched – the sheet underneath him now sharply crinkled like a bed of straw (or an imagined crown of thorns).

The surface texture plays such a strong role in these photos much of the seduction of these photos comes from the beauty of those imperfections. At times they can be nauseating, for their liquid streaks ooze over the images of aged flesh keeping viscera and bodily fluids as a second metaphoric subject. On the cover image, the disturbed collodion emulsion leaves a pattern which seems to be both looking at, and looking inside, the torso standing before the camera. Like Lee Friedlander’s shadow self-portrait (see the cover of Like a One-eyed Cat) where his organs are replaced with a jumble of rocks and his head is filled with straw, Mann’s image turns Larry’s insides into a mix of man and machine – collodion cogs and gears. This is the most wishful, as it portrays the strongest sense of life and the perhaps even the possibility of escaping its mortality. He stands at table’s edge with a steadying hand and a closed fist.

The most remarkable image for me appears as plate 20 and is captioned Time and the Bell (2008). Like the aforementioned cover image, this is an ideal as Mann has turned her husband’s head and shoulders into a profile bust of marble – the washed out light tones give way to a few angular shapes of rich shadow. It could be a still life of artefacts from an artists work space, a table and a sculptural work in progress. The surprise of the photographic description, which is present in most of the photos in Proud Flesh, is so complex and engaging for me it is difficult to not have it outshine all of the rest.

Text from 5B4: Photography and Books blog October 1, 2009 [Online] Cited 28/04/2019. No longer available online

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Semaphore
2003
Gelatin silver print
Contact print from a wet-plate collodion negative

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951) 'Hephaestus' 2008 from the exhibition 'Proud Flesh' by Sally Mann at Gagosian Gallery, New York, Sept - Oct, 2009

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Hephaestus
2008
Gelatin silver print
Contact print from a wet-plate collodion negative

Sally Mann’s poignant image of her husband, Larry, symbolises both his illness and his skill as a blacksmith.

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
The Nature of Loneliness
2008
Gelatin silver print
Contact print from a wet-plate collodion negative
15 x 13 1/2 inches

Sally Mann (American, b. 1951)
Somnambulist
2009
Gelatin silver print
Contact print from a wet-plate collodion negative

Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present “Proud Flesh”, a series of new photographs by Sally Mann.

Children, landscape, lovers – these iconic subjects are as common to the photographic lexicon as light itself. But Mann’s take on them, rendered through processes both traditional and esoteric, is anything but common. From the outset of her career she has consistently challenged the viewer, rendering everyday experiences at once sublime and deeply disquieting.

In previous projects, Mann has explored the relationships between parent and child, brother and sister, human and nature, site and history. Her latest photographic study of her husband Larry Mann, taken over six years, has resulted in a series of candid nude studies of a mature male body that neither objectifies nor celebrates the focus of its gaze. Rather it suggests a profoundly trusting relationship between woman and man, artist and model that has produced a full range of impressions – erotic, brutally frank, disarmingly tender, and more. While the relation of artist and model is, traditionally, a male-dominated field that has yielded countless appraisals of the female body and psyche, Mann reverses the role by turning the camera on her husband during some of his most vulnerable moments.

Mann’s technical methods and process further emphasise the emotional and temporal aspects of these fragile life studies. The images are contact prints made from wet-plate collodion negatives, produced by coating a sheet of glass with ether-based collodion and submerging it in silver nitrate. Mann exploits the surface aberrations that can result from the unpredictability of the process to produce painterly photographs marked by stark contrasts of light and dark, with areas that resemble scar tissue. In works such as Hephaestus and Ponder Heart, the scratches and marks incurred in the production process become inseparable from the physical reality of Larry’s body.”

Text from the Gagosian Gallery website [Online] Cited 10/10/2009. No longer available online