Sally Mann's photography

A few years ago I discovered the world of Sally Mann's photography, and her photo album "Immediate Family" struck me especially hard. Powerful, striking work...

Probably every creative person gifted by God sees this world differently from the ordinary onlooker. But not everyone can convey that vision to others, can get across the meaning of their own way of looking at reality. It is harder still to stand by your point of view and not betray yourself to please public opinion. When a person like this looks at life, and at the world as a whole, through the lens of a camera, that is when works are born that delight some and outrage others. Either way, it makes us stop and think — a spirit of contradiction arises.

So, Sally Mann is one of the finest women photographers; a single signed print of hers sells for around $10,000 on average. She shoots on an antique large-format view camera more than a hundred years old. That is exactly what accounts for the phenomenal plasticity and the distinctive look of all her photographs — modern full-frame cameras with their 36×24 mm sensors stand no chance against 200×250 mm film. Another feature of working with a camera like this is how unhurried and extraordinarily laborious it is. Because of all this, every single frame holds a great deal of the photographer herself — her thoughts, her emotions, her energy. By these criteria of "inner fullness," it is precisely photographs made with such a large-format camera that come closest to an artist's drawings and paintings.

Honestly, Sally Mann's work itself is deeply ambiguous. If I didn't know that the photographs show the photographer's own two daughters and son, I would have taken them for the typical work of a pedophile photographer — work that, by virtue of the artist's gift, has stepped over the line separating pornography from Art. But here, where the photographer is a loving mother... I really don't know what to think :)

Critics settled on the view that this is the promotion of pedophilia, violence and pornography in general — yet at the same time they noted that the face of modern American photography is impossible to imagine without this album... So the spirit of contradiction that accompanies the work of a talented person is unmistakably present here.

I want to shoot just as powerfully... and the same kind of money wouldn't hurt either :)