I'm so excited to say that my guest on the Great Women Artist Podcast is one of the world's most renowned photographers working today, Sally Mann.
Hailed for her images of nature in the remote American south – full of deeply layered memories and rivers that become characters of their own – and intimate portrayals of her children Jesse, Emmett and Virginia, Sally Mann creates photographs full of beauty. Beauty being something that is tied up with ephemerality, that is alive, that is in motion, something that we have to catch.
As she aptly wrote in her 2015 memoir, Hold Still, “there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay.” Mann's photographs are therefore both painterly and fleeting. They capture people on the cusp of something else, whether that be illness or an increasingly decaying body, but she also captures the land, connecting us to the ancient and the natural worlds.
Using an eight by 10 bellows camera and 19th century photographic techniques, her black and white aesthetic - that can be both dreamlike and hazy - chimes with her interest in memory and decay. Born in 1951 in Lexington, Virginia, Mann began her artistic career as a poet, but a deep dive in photography in the late 1960s whilst attending the Ansel Adams Gallery Yosemite Workshops was one of the catalysts for her photographic career. Words have always also taken center stage - she studied literature at Hollins College in Virginia in 1974 and completed an MA in creative writing the following year. She is the author of Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs and was the subject of two documentaries, Blood Ties in 1994, and What Remains in 2006.
However, this year she also released the New York Times bestselling book, Art Work: The Creative Life, a part memoir, part insight into her creative life, which is a strange and lonely one; one that is so personal and insular, and one that we can often take for granted and get angry at. Yet it was reading this that really reminded me about why so many of us do what we do…
Books mentioned:
Sally Mann - Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs: https://www.waterstones.com/book/hold-still/sally-mann/9780241699287
Sally Mann - Art Work: The Creative Life: https://www.waterstones.com/book/art-work/sally-mann/9780241774540
Artists mentioned:
Ansel Adams (1902–1984)
Edward Weston (1886–1958)
Cy Twombly (1928–2011)
Bill Brandt (1904–1983)
Robert Capa (1913–1954)
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879)
Mary Ellen Mark (1940–2015)
Joseph Szabo (b.1944)
Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822–1865)
Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976)
Artworks mentioned:
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato (1990): https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/10396
Sally Mann, Immediate Family series (1984–1992)
Sally Mann, Dead Duck (1988): https://observer.co.uk/culture/photography/article/sally-mann-my-quest-to-take-the-perfect-photograph-memoir
Sally Mann, Marital Trust series (1990s to the early 2000s, to be exhibited at Gagosian in 2027)
The Family of Man, a 1955 exhibition at MoMA, organised by Edward Steichen: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2429
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THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY THE LEVETT COLLECTION:
https://www.famm.com/en/
https://www.instagram.com/famm_mougins // https://www.merrellpublishers.com/9781858947037
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Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel
Sound editing by Nada Smiljanic
Music by Ben Wetherfield
