Photographer Sally Mann warns of 'new era of culture wars' after her art was removed
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
One of America's most influential and sometimes controversial photographers has a memoir out this month. Sally Mann's new book is called "Art Work." NPR's Olivia Hampton went to her studio in rural Virginia.
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OLIVIA HAMPTON, BYLINE: When you turn up the hill to Sally Mann's home, horses graze and gallop in lush green fields dotted with trees. She lives on this farm with her husband of 55 years and their two rescued Belgian Malinois dogs.
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SALLY MANN: Hi. Come on in.
HAMPTON: Nice to meet you.
MANN: No, no, likewise. Likewise.
HAMPTON: Mann was born in these bucolic foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. This place and the broader South have inspired her work, beating inside her, as she puts it in the book, like a second heart.
MANN: The South just runs through my - all my work. There's something about Southern light that's irresistible, but also the complexity that underlies its history.
HAMPTON: Racism and slavery and...
MANN: All of that is the complexity of which I speak.
HAMPTON: What makes Mann's images so captivating is how they convey that complexity. Their dreamy, timeless feel owes much to century-old equipment that she favors. It's cumbersome and time-consuming. To show me how it works, Mann walks down to a studio she keeps in a cabin.
MANN: Guess we waited a little long to mow this lawn. We should have run a hay baler through it.
HAMPTON: Here, she uses what's known as the we-plate process, which dates back to the 19th century. First, a glass plate is coated with a syrupy solution of collodion - highly flammable stuff. The chemicals would have been heated on a stove.
MANN: Your chemicals have to be a certain temperature, so I'd fill it with water. It's really a bad idea to have a wood stove in a collodion studio, but so far, I haven't blown up.
HAMPTON: The plate is then loaded into a dark slide holder and inserted into a large-format camera. She throws a dark cloth over her head and manually uncovers the lens to expose the plate. Mann's lenses and cameras often have flaws - at first, by necessity.
MANN: I wanted to do pictures that look different from other people's pictures. And I couldn't afford the equipment for the pictures that other people were taking, so I had to make do with what I had. And what I had was often cracked lenses or cameras with bellows that had holes in them, so strange light links came in.
HAMPTON: She also works with film cameras like her Deardorff, a hulking wooden box on a tripod with sides that look like an accordion. Cameras like these aren't manufactured anymore, and a used one can easily fetch $2,000. Mann sourced hers in a unique way in New York.
MANN: A friend was walking down 35th Street, and they had one of those chutes that came off, like, a fourth-floor window. They were destroying an apartment, and right in front of him, a Deardorff came down the trash chute. He crawled into the dumpster and grabbed this camera for me, and that's the camera I work with. It's a great camera. It's a little skewed because it was so roughly handled.
HAMPTON: It might sound scrappy, but Mann is a master at turning imperfections into art - even when the subject is tough. She photographed the site of Emmett Till's murder, corpses and the advance of muscular dystrophy on her husband's body. But it's her immediate family series of her children that sparked outrage during the 1990s culture wars. As she puts it in the book...
MANN: Intent doesn't matter. Your intent can be perfectly pure, and there's no way you can, like, chase after these pictures and say, no, no, no, no, no. That's not what I meant.
HAMPTON: In those pictures, the three children strike defiant or sublime poses, sometimes in the nude. Conservatives accused Mann of child abuse. Still, not once were her photographs taken off the walls of a public site - until this year.
MANN: We're entering a new era of culture wars, I'm quite sure. And I think the people who are pursuing this are much more sophisticated and have many more tools at hand.
HAMPTON: In January of this year, under pressure from a Christian advocacy group with backing from some local elected officials, police seized four of these prints from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas.
MANN: It was awful. It was shocking.
HAMPTON: The photographs are more than 30 years old. One shows Mann's daughter lying in a wet bed. In another, a popsicle drips on her son's lower body.
MANN: Never mind that Jesus Christ is portrayed any number of times in great paintings nude. That seems to be the trigger for them, is the nudity.
HAMPTON: A grand jury declined to bring charges, and the prints were returned to Mann's gallery after the show closed. But she worries that the seizure was just the tip of the iceberg. Mann says artists like her are reeling from the Trump administration's efforts to change the American cultural landscape and to remove from public view evidence of some of the more controversial aspects of the country's history.
MANN: It's chilling. They're actively rewriting history, and that's terrifying. This is Orwellian.
HAMPTON: Lindsey Halligan, the lawyer who's been leading a review of Smithsonian museums for the White House, told NPR she rejects that characterization. She says the administration is trying to, quote, "depoliticize" museums and show history without, quote, "partisan influence." In her memoir, Mann calls controversy a double-edged sword for artists.
MANN: Do we have an obligation to make our art, I don't want to say political, but sociologically investigative?
HAMPTON: I think the answer for you would be yes. You have done that.
MANN: Yeah, but it has to be beautiful, too. It's too important to set aside for any political or sociological statement.
HAMPTON: The book is candid about her insecurities, her failures and the role sheer luck plays in her success. She wants young artists to know it took time - 20 years for her - to gain major recognition.
MANN: That's one of the most important things in this book. I think early success can be really dangerous, and I think you have to be prepared to make a lot of work over a long period of time. If it's good enough work, irrespective of how many rejections you've had, it will be received. It will be seen eventually.
HAMPTON: At 74, Mann is still churning out new work, training her lens on the James River. A tributary runs near her home. She casually laid out some of those prints at the table where we sat to speak. Some focus on Point Comfort, where the first boats carrying enslaved people docked in 1619.
MANN: I'll make a little note as to exactly when the light hits that one sliver of river that I want illuminated, you know, and I'll go back and take it. You find what works and you repeat the picture until you get it.
HAMPTON: Olivia Hampton, NPR News, Lexington, Virginia.
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