With her brood safely strapped in, she drives a black BMW 735i, very fast, and favors a subdued, asexual preppy look - turtle-necks and T-shirts, cut-off shorts, dirty Reeboks. A 41-year-old dark-haired beauty whose turned-up nose accentuates a natural hauteur, she is a cool mom. The same attitude of defiance is there in the cover portrait of “Immediate Family.” Bare-chested with arms crossed or akimbo, the three little Manns level their gaze at the world.Ĭhildren and house both project the sensibilities of Sally Mann herself. Like the red-metal dragons that line the driveway or the 20-by-24-inch blowups of the children in the foyer or the photograph on the living room wall of Sally Mann’s father, dead in his bathrobe, the doorbell seems designed to give a start to the uninitiated and to put some comic distance between the occupants and their neighbors. Visitors announce themselves by pressing a red nipple within the raised areola. The doorbell at the Mann home in Lexington, Va., is a small, black, wrought-iron breast. You can be sure that Sally Mann wonders, too. Walking through the rooms of the gallery, you could not help but wonder what Emmett, Jessie and Virginia will think about these photographs and about their mother, if not this fall, then in 5, 10 or 15 years. “It May Be Art, but What About the Kids?” said the headline in an angry review in The San Diego Tribune. And Mann’s images of childhood injuries - Emmett with a nosebleed, Jessie with a swollen eye - have led some critics to challenge her right to record such scenes of distress.
Artforum, traditionally the most radical magazine in the New York art world, refused to publish a picture of a nude Jessie swinging on a hay hook. When The Wall Street Journal ran a photograph of then-4-year-old Virginia, it censored her eyes, breasts and genitals with black bars. The nudity of the children has caused problems for many publications, including this one.
Not all the scrutiny has been welcome or favorable. 29 at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. And it will likely continue now that Aperture has published a monograph of “Immediate Family” in conjunction with a traveling museum show, opening on Oct. Probably no photographer in history has enjoyed such a burst of success in the art world. Since the beginning of the year, Houk Friedman has taken orders for more than 300 prints, well over a half-million dollars worth of photographs, and the waiting period for delivery of new prints is at least a year. And the work that resulted has changed the lives of all involved. Eight years ago, their mother began to chronicle their growing up - the wet beds, insect bites, nap times, their aspirations toward adulthood and their innocent savagery. The Mann children have endured scrutiny for some time now.
All three seemed unconcerned by the fact that on the surrounding white walls they could be examined, up close, totally nude. “These shoes cost $70,” he boasted about his opening night footwear. Beneath a portrait of himself in the water, Emmett shrugged off the stares and expressed a typical teen-age frame of mind. While her mother and father conversed with friends and admirers, Jessie orbited the four rooms in her red dress, fielding questions from strangers eager to know more about her parents. Motoring among the spectators like honorees at a testimonial dinner, Mann’s three children - Emmett, 12, Jessie, 10, and Virginia, 7 - looked completely at ease with the crowd’s prying adoration. Īt the opening last spring of “Immediate Family,” Sally Mann’s show at the Houk Friedman Gallery in New York, the winsome young subjects of the photographs aroused as much curiosity as the artist herself. 27, 1992, and is discussed in an article by Sally Mann in the April 19 issue. This cover story appeared in the magazine on Sept.
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