| Sally Mann’s statement is insightful but it addresses only one element that contributes to the impact of this work. The book Proud Flesh and the accompanying exhibition, which opened at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in September, are the latest installments in Mann’s continuing thematic and visual explorations that ultimately deepen key subject matter of her art: Southern history and her family’s relationship to it. Proud Flesh began its life in 2003 as an offshoot of Mann’s ongoing project of photographing her husband Larry. One late sunny afternoon, she photographed Larry’s arm using her trusted 100-plus-year-old 8-by-10 bellows view camera. They found they liked the experience, and decided to continue to share this inspiring quality time. |  |
Milton Fletcher
Proud Flesh bespeaks a strong, trusting relationship between the photographer and the subject with the subject basically being asked to give a lot to the camera and to the viewer. —Sally Mann
Sally Mann’s statement is insightful but it addresses only one element that contributes to the impact of this work. The book Proud Flesh and the accompanying exhibition, which opened at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in September, are the latest installments in Mann’s continuing thematic and visual explorations that ultimately deepen key subject matter of her art: Southern history and her family’s relationship to it.
Proud Flesh began its life in 2003 as an offshoot of Mann’s ongoing project of photographing her husband Larry. One late sunny afternoon, she photographed Larry’s arm using her trusted 100-plus-year-old 8-by-10 bellows view camera. They found they liked the experience, and decided to continue to share this inspiring quality time. Larry’s body changed as the years have gone on, especially with the progress of his muscular dystrophy, which has caused a slow withering of one of his arms and legs.
Mann decided to photograph her husband in one room with windows, and it became the permanent setting over the years as this project evolved. It’s an austere space that gets good natural light throughout the seasons. The furniture and objects in this room include a chair, a stool, rug, some textured fabrics, and a wooden worktable with a worn quilt on the top. These basic, timeless objects are used to great effect in a number of plates—images that are sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, or a combination of both. The same can be said for the depictions of Larry. Mann never reveals him in full form—just pieces—limbs, torso, and genitalia along with other parts of his anatomy. They are like pieces to a puzzle.
This eclectic approach allows Mann to get loose and experiment with different creative ideas that are rich in variety but unified in the moody black, white, and gray tonal palette all the plates share. “It’s the insistence of really, really looking that Proud Flesh demands,” Mann observes. “It was hard to take 33 pictures of one person’s body.”
By really looking, Proud Flesh presents a broader array of imagery and photographic styles than one typically associates with her work. Of particular note is that there are stylistic references to post-Civil War, non-Southern photographers and photographic eras. Time and the Bell can remind one of a Man Ray Rayograph in its ghostly forms and inverted tones. Images such as Somnambulist and Xerxes Wept with their leg flexing poses can recall stills extracted from an Eadweard Muybridge body motion series. The angularity and balance of still-life objects to Larry’s soft, curved back in The Quality of the Affection suggests the elegant harmony of André Kertész’s work.
Mann softens the hermetic feel of the Proud Flesh images by choosing plate titles to reveal a broad array of worldly associations: by terms mythical (Hephaestus), poetic (Eliot’s Kingsfisher’s Wing), biblical (David) and humorous (Tricky Dick).
Poet C. D. Wright contributes the book’s introduction. She embroiders into the text the titles of some of the Proud Flesh pieces. Wright also gives an evocative sense of how the photo sessions went. In all, it is an intro with a lyrical eye for detail that helps prepare the viewer for the images to come.
But for all of Proud Flesh’s eclecticism, it is Mann’s references to the Civil-War-era South that are most stirring. It connects Mann’s present (her husband’s condition) to the South’s past (the ravages of the Civil War) and combines them. Works such as Johnny Reb, and Chimborazo, the name of a Confederate hospital, make Mann’s synthesis manifest. It is these pieces that redefine the physical and metaphorical space where Mann works as a weathered Civil War patients’ ward where suffering and healing continue to battle each other.
Other plates depict the most universally touching themes in Proud Flesh: physical weakness and physical strength. The stark frail leg that appears in The Grand Perhaps is unsettling in its vulnerability. The high contrast ratio of the plate gives it the intensity of a Wee Gee crime scene shot. The death slab composition of Speak, Memory can imply the exhausted martyrdom of Jesus removed from the cross or the defeated corpse of Che Guevara.
Mann wisely contrasts these types of pieces to ones like Memory’s Truth. A powerful forearm and fist punctures down from the top of the frame, like the hand of Zeus clenching his fist and asserting power. Indomitable.
As with much of Mann’s previous work, the power of Proud Flesh is achieved through her tolerance of quirks and accidents, which a more conventional photographer might regard as defects. “It’s the evocative and expressive that’s important,” Mann explains, “so there is no such thing as wrong once you learn to embrace and take advantage.”
This perspective was acquired and enforced from Mann’s extensive experiences with the temperamental and ultra-sensitive wet-plate collodion photography process which demands that Mann work with chance in her photography. Random elements such as dust and air currents create distortions in addition to the “imperfections” that can occur when Mann makes a contact print from the 13 ½-by-15-inch glass plate negative.
Sometimes these distortions reveal a unifying cohesion with the other elements of the image or between the various prints she’s working with. When this happens, Mann can develop thematic motifs. The physically damaged prints in Proud Flesh mirror its subject matter—the damage that comes from fate. The effect of these images’ deformities is an ironic beauty that epitomizes Mann’s approach to art.
After spending time with Proud Flesh, it becomes clear how it fits snugly in Mann’s existing work as it continue Mann’s meditations on life, time, family, and the South. Immediate Family controversially explored and celebrated the flush of her children’s youth. What Remains examined, in part, what happens to the body after death. Deep South depicted physical locations steeped in tragic history. Proud Flesh portrays the sags and bulges that occur as the living body deteriorates. Some may find these preoccupations morbid, but not Mann. It’s a fertile place she’s been immersed from life experience and her innate character, from being exposed from childhood to her doctor father’s earnest interest in representations of death, to her own intense will to look and contemplate some of life’s more unsettling mysteries. This background and drive are essential to understanding how Mann sees and interprets things on her own unique terms.
By deepening her vision, Mann is attempting—and succeeding—in creating a lasting body of work that has already lifted her into the realm of our great contemporary artists. Her images will be studied and dissected by future generations because of her willingness to follow her fascinations and create challenging, poetic work that is timeless. Her singular artistry, along with her international fame, is also helping to define a uniquely American artistic identity to the world. “I hope [Proud Flesh] will live on. I hope it will have a long life,” Mann has stated. It will. You can bet a stack of dissertations on it.
