Immediate Family
April 24, 2015 3:24 AM   Subscribe

Sally Mann's Exposure An essay by Sally Mann about the publication, and subsequent reaction to, her second book of photographs, Immediate Family. [Many of the photographs featured naked images of her young children.]
posted by OmieWise (44 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
A rare gem of an essay, one that spawns so many thoughts and emotions I long for an empty morning to mull them over. But there is work to be done.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 4:49 AM on April 24, 2015 [4 favorites]


Like Brandon Blatcher says, it is a gem of an essay.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:42 AM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was so freaked out by her LOOKING RIGHT AT ME AND MOVING that I just kept scrolling up and down slowly like I was watching a horror movie with one hand over my eyes.

How do they DO THAT?????
posted by kinetic at 5:48 AM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


This essay left me almost shaking with rage. I'm so tired of pious assholes and their poison it's impossible for me to even effectively describe the extent to which I feel it.

The worst part is that I want to write her to say that she shouldn't listen to anonymous internet assholes, but then again I'M an anonymous internet asshole.
posted by nevercalm at 6:03 AM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


Count me in with the people who found this a well-done, affecting essay. I'm a writer, and have written a great deal about my children, in ways that certainly expose them. It's been tricky to navigate, and I've gone through a constant process of re-evaluation as they've gotten older, consulting with my partner, trusted friends, and the children themselves. I found Mann's thinking about her photos of her children complex and at least somewhat ambivalent, and I had mixed feelings about the photographs themselves, some of which made me uncomfortable and some of which I loved. The picture that made me the most uncomfortable was the one of her daughter still sitting at the table with an uneaten piece of fish at 9:30 p.m., because that kind of food conflict was a very painful part of my own childhood.

Anyway, I didn't always agree with her, either with her statements or with the decisions she made about specific photographs. But I appreciate her taking on the questions.
posted by not that girl at 6:19 AM on April 24, 2015 [6 favorites]


Indeed what a wise and honest article about art. I'm glad she's able to admit that her choices to make art out of her family's lives aren't without consequence, but in the end I agree with her that it was worth it.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:22 AM on April 24, 2015


The photos are beautiful, but she was really naive to think that people wouldn't lose their shit re the nudes. Also I probably would have delayed publication until the kids had reached adulthood. They didn't deserve to experience the third eye that Mann describes in the essay.

And man, the WSJ, what incredible, incredible assholes.
posted by longdaysjourney at 6:22 AM on April 24, 2015 [3 favorites]


Also I probably would have delayed publication until the kids had reached adulthood. They didn't deserve to experience the third eye that Mann describes in the essay.

From the 1992 Times magazine cover story referenced in this article:
Last spring, Mann decided not to publish “Immediate Family”: “I thought the book could wait 10 years, when the kids won’t be living in the same bodies. They’ll have matured and they’ll understand the implications of the pictures. I unilaterally decided.” Her fait accompli provoked an uproar from the children. “They were angry I hadn’t asked them.” Family meetings were held. Emmett and Jessie were sent to a psychologist to make certain they understood the issues. (Virginia was thought to be too young for such an encounter.)

“Sally and Larry asked me to get ‘beyond the patter,’ to find out how the kids really felt about the pictures,” says the psychologist, Daniel Shybunko, who found both children to be “well adjusted and self-assured. They identify with their parents, which they’re supposed to do as pre-adolescents. In the course of the interview, we probed beyond that. There was some ambivalence. They certainly recognized the consequences that were negative as well as positive. It’s a family that really seems to work. There’s a consistency of values and life style and, as a couple, Sally and Larry are really accessible to their kids.”
posted by milk white peacock at 6:32 AM on April 24, 2015 [8 favorites]


This was an astonishing and deep read. There's much to parse there.
posted by dejah420 at 6:45 AM on April 24, 2015


kinetic: "I was so freaked out by her LOOKING RIGHT AT ME AND MOVING that I just kept scrolling up and down slowly like I was watching a horror movie with one hand over my eyes.

How do they DO THAT?????
"

It's an .avi element.
posted by dejah420 at 6:46 AM on April 24, 2015


I admire her candour and her thoughtfulness. If it were me I'd have shut up about it.
posted by Segundus at 6:50 AM on April 24, 2015


Sensitive, beautiful essay. Plus I just love her photos. But there will always be people who get the vapors about nudity, which is (one reason) why we can't have nice things. Engage, and try to change their minds? Or avoid the issue for the sake of the kids? A hard choice. In any event, I'm glad the kids were involved in the decisions.
posted by GrammarMoses at 7:06 AM on April 24, 2015


I feel very, very conflicted about the essay and her photos. While she's obviously a talented photographer, a six year old cannot consent to the distribution of nude photos, and should not have been in the position to be embroiled in a mess with the Wall Street Journal to begin with.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:21 AM on April 24, 2015 [5 favorites]


Would photos taken of a clothed child who can't consent to their distribution be less exploitative?
posted by muddgirl at 7:37 AM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


muddgirl, slightly moreso, yeah.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:39 AM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm honestly curious why that would be.
posted by muddgirl at 7:44 AM on April 24, 2015


I'm honestly curious why that would be.

IMHO. You have a right, before you are old enough to consent to sharing it, to the privacy of your naked body. Everyone walks around clothed in public, and anyone can take your picture. If you aren't taking a newsworthy photo of a naked child, I personally don't think you should be profiting from that.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 7:49 AM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


I am wondering what makes her different from Irina Ionesco.
posted by SkylitDrawl at 7:49 AM on April 24, 2015


Muddgirl, because our society considers nudity in children to be unusual, somewhat antisocial, and sometimes weirdly sexual. Although it's true that publishing images of children in any state means the small likelihood of getting a creepy stalker (as mentioned in the NYTimes article), publishing nude photos of children will definitely attract attention of the media, the law enforcement apparatus, and people who mean well.

All publication of art takes place in a social context, and whether you think the social context is correct or moral or not, I think parents have a responsibility to consider what society will do to and about their children.

Parents have always made decisions that are less-safe or less-protective of their children because of principles--"I'll send the children to this newly-desegregated school, although they may be exposed to taunts and violence, because I believe in...", "I'll continue my controversial work in this town although my children suffer social exclusion, because it's important to the world...", "I'll write and publish about my child because my artistic needs and the demands of honest work...".

Now, of course, we are having this discussion because this woman's artistic and political choices and principles are colliding with societal principles, and it's all being played out on the bodies (as it were) of these children.
posted by Hypatia at 8:00 AM on April 24, 2015 [3 favorites]


I am wondering what makes her different from Irina Ionesco.

Ionesco seems to be going for the erotic look, where as Mann's are anything but erotic.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:00 AM on April 24, 2015


I admire her candour and her thoughtfulness. If it were me I'd have shut up about it.

so would I. But somehow I feel democracy is safer in her hands.
posted by philip-random at 8:10 AM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


Sally Mann is by far my favorite photographer. Immediate Family moves me in a way that I find hard to describe, but has nothing to do with a sexual reaction. I think it's hard for me not to see the whole book as a set of photographs about a fantasy world. Kids being nude in that world seem perfectly legitimate, and not at all sexual. But her more recent work is also fabulous. What Remains, her photographs of decaying corpses, is both disturbing and evocative of the guts of life. It's very good.

It's strange to see people here commenting as if they have never before heard of Sally Mann. I'm not sure I could form a cogent comment about her work and the controversy around it merely by reading this essay, even though the essay explicitly reflects on that controversy. I think you have to sit with the photographs a bit to see if you can understand them in their own context, and see if the choices Mann made (and makes) hang together. Her work is very much about the human body, in all kinds of abjection, and I think Immediate Family is part of that larger exploration. Comparing her to Irina Ionesco is just about the weirdest comparison I can think of making.
posted by OmieWise at 8:11 AM on April 24, 2015 [10 favorites]


It's strange to see people here commenting as if they have never before heard of Sally Mann.

Admittedly, I had never heard of her before this morning.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 8:22 AM on April 24, 2015


They both took pictures of their children nude. They both are controversial but famous photographers. The "feel" of their work is different (because, yes, Irina was going for erotica and Sally purportedly wasn't), but both create striking, powerful, sometimes disturbing images. But many are firmly behind Sally Mann's photography, while simultaneously terribly squicked out by the photography of Irina Ionesco. Is it because Eva objects to the photographs her mother took of her, and Mann's children do not?
posted by SkylitDrawl at 8:23 AM on April 24, 2015


I think parents have a responsibility to consider what society will do to and about their children.

It seems to me like Mann certainly did consider what society will do. Perhaps she made the wrong choice, or an uniformed choice, but it doesn't seem to me like she made it lightly or thoughtlessly.
posted by muddgirl at 8:25 AM on April 24, 2015 [4 favorites]


They both took pictures of their children nude. [...] Is it because Eva objects to the photographs her mother took of her, and Mann's children do not?

No, it's because their work is nothing alike aside from the showing their children nude. You didn't ask why some people like Mann who might not like Ionesco, you asked why Mann's work was different. Your comparison is a little like comparing pasta and cream of wheat, or cream of wheat and bread. They are both made from (some of) the same ingredients, but your question is difficult to answer because asking it shows that you may well be missing some of the foundational concepts that would be present in any cogent explanation.
posted by OmieWise at 8:38 AM on April 24, 2015 [4 favorites]


Is it because Eva objects to the photographs her mother took of her, and Mann's children do not?

Well no. Eva had her daughter appearing in playboy at 11. Mann did not and I suspect would be completely against the idea.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:40 AM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'm assuming it is the difference between Sally and Irina's intent that matters, but where is the line?
posted by SkylitDrawl at 8:40 AM on April 24, 2015


Irina had her daughter posing in a manner similar to adults, including attire that was designed for adults. Mann photographed her children as they were at home and by all accounts, there was little staging. The kids were just going around being kids. Irina's daughter was put into specific poses and situations that mimic adulthood, with its (usually) fuller understanding of sexuality.

To me, that's a big line of difference, but that's just me.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:45 AM on April 24, 2015 [4 favorites]


From the 1992 Times magazine cover story referenced in this article

That article also lists Emmet's and Jessie's ages: Emmett, 12, Jessie, 10. So they were probably 9-12 years old when they saw the psychologist. While I appreciate that Emmet and Jessie supported the publication of "Immediate Family" even when they were children and that their parents sent them to a psychologist for an outside opinion as to whether their children knew what they were supporting, I still think that Mann should have exercised her right, both as photographer and parent, to delay publication. Parents do a lot of things that their kids disagree with in the interests of protecting them from the dangers and cruelty of the world. I don't think children as young as Emmett and Jessie (and certainly Virginia) were at the time the book was published have any conception of those dangers and that cruelty. And it was up to their parents to protect them from these things, even if their kids disagreed.

It would be interesting to see if Emmet, Jessie and Virginia, as adults, still agree with the publication of these photos, even after learning of the stalking incidents.
posted by longdaysjourney at 9:25 AM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


Thanks for posting this. The essay was just about as clear sighted and intense as her photographs. Fabulous clarity, technically emerging from a very narrow depth of field, as I believe she's written about elsewhere. I was gobsmacked when I first saw them, being at that time enmeshed in similar domesticities, fierce sensualities. It was the only work I'd seen that expressed anything like the reality of it, the power of it, that most mundane of human situations, looking at your young children.

picked pinworms from itchy butts with the rounded ends of bobby pins Um, not that though. What's that about?
posted by glasseyes at 11:19 AM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


Thinking about this:

I must do so with both ardor and cool appraisal, with the passions of eye and heart, but in that ardent heart there must also be a splinter of ice.

I do think that the notion women may go about their societal roles unbounded by social pressure or biological determinism or hormones or 'duty' or what have you, is a very threatening thought to a great many people.
posted by glasseyes at 11:23 AM on April 24, 2015 [3 favorites]


IMHO. You have a right, before you are old enough to consent to sharing it, to the privacy of your naked body. Everyone walks around clothed in public, and anyone can take your picture.

I've been thinking about this point for a few hours. It is considered ethical/legal (in the United States) to take a child's picture in public and share it with whomever, but that's not a fair comparison. If I invite someone to my house, that doesn't give them the right to take and share pictures of my family in our private domain. Children do have an expectation of privacy in their home, even if they're clothed. And yet, parents can decide to share private family photos of children under the age of consent, even for profit - bloggers do it all the time. And they can suffer consequences for it, including hate mail and stalkers.
posted by muddgirl at 11:24 AM on April 24, 2015


(And on that note, it appears you can take a photo of a near-naked kid in public with no outcry as long as they're playing in a fountain)
posted by muddgirl at 11:43 AM on April 24, 2015


One thing that hasn't been commented on here is the fact that the pictures were published over twenty years ago, and some of them taken over 25 years ago. A lot of the concern here seems more reflective of the concern over child pornography, which easy internet access made vastly easier both to find and to distribute. The NYT Magazine article that fanned the flames of the controversy was published about a year before the Eternal September, and a few years after the Mapplethorpe controversy; I also find it striking how she describes the writer as "press[ing] his foot hard on the controversy throttle" and telling her that "that he had 'dined out for months' on the article." I'm not trying to claim that art books featuring naked children were particularly common in the pre-online era, although one might note the covers of certain albums by Led Zeppelin, Cream and the Scorpions. But, yeah, things were a bit different then.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:33 PM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]


If you aren't taking a newsworthy photo of a naked child, I personally don't think you should be profiting from that.

I'm honestly not sure which part of your attitude offends me the most. That you've decided what art should or should not be allowed (based on total ignorance of the artist in question), or that you've decided you (again, based on total ignorance of their family) know how to parent these children better than their mother.

Not coincidentally, this attitude is the reason why I am hesitant to have children. And make art. There's always someone in the community who feels entitled to impose their judgement on your decisions.
posted by danny the boy at 1:01 PM on April 24, 2015 [4 favorites]


things were a bit different then.

They were: and interestingly an artist who played in those waters has recently(ish) been jailed for child sex abuse. But I think you would have to be oddly unable to read images to confuse Ovenden's wistful, passive, objectified little girls with Mann's fierce, stroppy, candid children. I just came across this again - Jessie Bites - and it's a such a study of, on the one hand, the aesthetic visual content of an image and on the other the emotional states and stormy actions the image alludes to, the tension takes my breath away. It's an uncompromising picture: nothing about the child is compromised. They have full respect from the image maker. The detachment to do that, to accord that respect, is again very much at odds with a mother's supposed role.

Not everybody finds it easy to read images, and issues of consent and of agency remain confusing (to many) in an emotional context. The interpretation of images benefits from a growing body of criticism analysing and explaining it. Having said that, in the uk we're finding a lot of historically relaxed attitudes towards sexuality and young people were in retrospect, well dodgy and sometimes criminal.
posted by glasseyes at 1:08 PM on April 24, 2015 [3 favorites]


mudgirl: I hate to say it but I bet a photo of a little blond white girl in her underwear with obvious markers indicating 'middle or upper class', 'contemporary USA', would elicit criticism. So there is something of an element of who is and who is not allowed to be objectified, or exoticised, and who has to be seen to have agency, even if only by association.

I think this is part of the reason for the reaction to the Sally Mann photos, because in a way she's considered her own children as an anthropological project. And yet it's more complicated than that, because her love and fiercely intense attention - the quality of her gaze - are explicitly part of her toolkit,* as much as her camera is.

* (Which makes it a thing also, part of what's being studied.)
posted by glasseyes at 1:29 PM on April 24, 2015 [2 favorites]


They both took pictures of their children nude. They both are controversial but famous photographers. The "feel" of their work is different (because, yes, Irina was going for erotica and Sally purportedly wasn't), but both create striking, powerful, sometimes disturbing images.

Mann spent an entire (excellent) essay explaining that erotica was the farthest thing from her mind when she took these pictures, yet you say she "purportedly wasn't". Do you have some doubt that Mann considered these pictures erotica at the time of production or publication? Why do you believe that Ionesco was clearly trying to create erotica and Mann may have been, despite her clear statements about her work?

I believe that this sort of hedging and denying the artist's plainly stated purpose says much more about the commenter than about the artist or the art. I find this to be a common technique, particularly in political discussions.
posted by Warren Terra at 7:14 PM on April 24, 2015 [3 favorites]



That was a fucking great essay.
posted by From Bklyn at 2:28 AM on April 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


picked pinworms from itchy butts with the rounded ends of bobby pins Um, not that though. What's that about?

You catch pinworms by swallowing the eggs -- kids get infected at school and daycare because it is so easily transmissible, and then kids in a family can keep passing around the worms unless everyone goes through a couple rounds of treatment and all surfaces are cleaned. It itches because the adult worms crawl out your bunghole to lay their eggs, leading you to scratch in your sleep and then (of course) pass on the eggs.

Treatment is usually with deworming drugs, not with bobby pins, though.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:52 AM on April 25, 2015 [1 favorite]


Jock Sturges (some images NSFW) is another photographer who has been equally praised and vilified for his nude photography of mostly underage girls (NSFW)
posted by Quasimike at 2:56 PM on April 25, 2015


The thing is... Well, look for myself it's clear that Sturges is viewing his subjects as young women that have their own world tied up with their physical being. Personally, I think and always thought, he was a creep. (There was a novel loosely based on his time when he was teaching at boarding school x- basically about a 14 yr old girls dealings with him.).
Whereas ms Mann's photos and especially now I have kids of my own, are about a much rounder nuance perception of these kids.
I didn't get the comparing Mann w/ Ionesco: if you don't see the difference there's no way I'm hiring you as a babysitter.
posted by From Bklyn at 3:43 PM on April 25, 2015


Treatment is usually with deworming drugs, not with bobby pins, though.

The doctor needs to see the worms in order to prescribe those drugs, but they generally come out at night, so you collect a sample at home to bring in.
posted by milk white peacock at 3:42 AM on April 26, 2015


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