Goldin writes in the introduction to her classic work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, that, “There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to a party. Pictures of Mann’s naked children and pictures of Goldin’s family/friends in their personal squalor, or Goldin’s own face with an eye blackened by a lover, insist that the sometimes painful intimacy of daily life be represented unfiltered. Like Sally Mann, Nan Goldin uses her camera as a tool to create a record, to remember everything as it happened. The magic of photography is its ability to capture reality in living detail. Despite Mann’s purity of artistic intent, her work raised the ugly specter of those who purport to defend the innocence of children, and the terrifying threat of those who would defile that innocence for their own pleasure.įor many, a photograph is meant to be a physical manifestation of a memory, fundamentally immutable and permanent, even when digital. Several family pictures depict Mann’s children completely nude, and Mann-whose children consented to the use of these photos in the 1992 book-defended them as documents of her life, devoid of sexual connotation. She addresses this in her new memoir, Hold Still. Such pictures evoked strong negative reactions when they were first exhibited, overshadowing Mann’s talent and numinous style. One photo shows an endless expanse of tree-lined water, with the sun reflecting off the foreground where Mann’s son-naked and submerged from the waist down-disturbs the silken lake and looks accusingly at the camera. Those pictures also show a photographer’s ability to understand the value of children as naturally desirous of the sublime.
#Capturing reality site down full
Sally Mann’s work demonstrates the intimacy and trust involved in making a photograph, in manufacturing awe her Family Pictures (1984-1991) show her children as intense, self-assured, and no doubt in full possession of their mother’s piercing intellect. With an endlessly reproduced medium we have lost Walter Benjamin’s “aura,” so the artist must work to replace the awe we feel in the presence of a work of art with an awe we feel merely by viewing it. The authenticity of subject replaces the authenticity of a physical artifact in photography. In the quest to remember, she must peel away a layer of waking life to make a photograph. Candid snapshots by the paparazzi, provocative nudes, freaks-the photographer, like the journalist, is always selling somebody out.
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