Pressestimmen
"[Mann's photographs] suggest that the camera is adept at depicting the desires of the subconscious as it is in rendering the shapes of everyday life."--Andy Grundberg, the "New York Times"
"These are photographs of my children. . . . Many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictions and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things every mother has seen. I take pictures when they are bloodied or sick or naked or angry. They dress up, they pout and posture, they paint their bodies, they dive like otters in the dark river."--Sally Mann, from the Introduction
"[Sally Mann] makes pictures of children--luminously beautiful black-and-white images of mysteriously elfin chidren around [her] rural home in Lexington, Virginia. These are riveting, enigmatic narrative images."--Ken Johnson, "Art in America"
"Her photographs are imbued with a seductive, surreal Southern sensibility. Like the writers Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, or William Faulkner, she has a great potential for telling stories. Her work pulls you in--it's very beguiling."--Davis Pratt, as quoted in the "Boston Globe"
"Sally Mann continues to probe the intimate life of her family and come up with startling, disquieting revelations. Mann's extraordinary picture of her nude daughter suspended like a shimmering white fish on a porch with unconcerned adults resonates in your mind like a dream."--Vince Aletti, the "Village Voice"
Kurzbeschreibung
Taken against the Arcadian backdrop of her woodland home in Virginia, Sally Mann's extraordinary, intimate photographs of her children--Emmett, Jessie, and Virginia--reveal truths that embody the individuality of her immediate family and ultimately take on a universal quality. Mann states that her work is "about everybody's memories, as well as their fears," a theme echoed by Reynolds Price in his eloquent, poignantly reflective essay accompanying the photographs in Immediate Family.
With sublime dignity, acute wit, and feral grace, Mann's pictures explore the eternal struggle between the child's simultaneous dependence and quest for autonomy--the holding on, and the breaking away. This is the stuff of which Greek dramas are made: impatience, terror, self-discovery, self-doubt, pain, vulnerability, role-playing, and a sense of immortality, all of which converge in Sally Mann's astonishing photographs.
A traveling exhibition of Immediate Family, organized by Aperture, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in the fall of 1992.