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The Lexington, Va. photographer’s newest book,“Deep South,” will be released in September – a collection of landscapes from Virginia, Georgia and Mississippi. Mann’s previous books include “What Remains” and “Immediate Family.” Named America’s Best Photographer by Time magazine in 1991, Mann is the subject of two HBO/BBC documentaries, the second to be released in early 2006.
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sallymann_so05
The Lexington, Va. photographer’s newest book,“Deep South,” will be released in September – a collection of landscapes from Virginia, Georgia and Mississippi. Mann’s previous books include “What Remains” and “Immediate Family.” Named America’s Best Photographer by Time magazine in 1991, Mann is the subject of two HBO/BBC documentaries, the second to be released in early 2006.
Can you talk a little about how “Deep South” came to be?
It turned out to be an accretion of different projects. Like all my projects, I didn’t think about what the end product would be – I just started taking pictures. It started with pictures of the farm – I’ve been taking pictures on this farm since 1972, but gradually I began to cast my net a little further out in the state, and then further South.
You’re also using new techniques?
The pictures of Georgia were taken with ortho [SP] film. One out of every 10 turns out at all; they’re so wildly overexposed – they develop really fast and much of the time the flaws you see in the book are the results of that rapid development. The Virginia pictures were made with regular film, black and white. The “Deep South” section is a mix of regular film and wet plate collodion photography.
And that was what you used for the Civil War pictures in your last book [“What Remains”]?
Yes. I have a darkroom set up in the back of a suburban – you open the back doors and the darkroom’s in there.
Collodion was used during the Civil War to heal wounds, which I think is kind of symbolic somehow. You pour it on a plain piece of 8x10 glass. It’s a viscous liquid like thin corn syrup. You immerse it in a bath of silver nitrate.
After the silver nitrate has stuck to the collodion, for reasons I can’t even begin to tell you, it becomes light sensitive for about five minutes during which you have to take your picture.
When I look at your images, especially the latest two books, I feel like I’m looking at photos that have been discovered in the bottom of a trunk in an attic. Is that the effect you’re trying to create, or part of it?
I’m an unabashed sentimentalist – I don’t mind using the quality of nostalgia to that effect. I want to make very modern pictures with a very modern sensibility, but I also want to do it with a process that’s complementary to my vision. So, no photographer in the 1860s, which is when this technology was used, would have ever taken the pictures that I take.
What’s the difference? What would they have shot?
For one thing, when they did landscapes, which is what I’m doing, they went for the grandeur, the bowl-you-over, Ansel Adamsish pictures.
The role of the photographer back then was to take images that they could bring back and sell to the public – especially images of the new western frontier. In a sense their images were glorified, technically perfect, mammoth postcards. My work is quieter, sometimes just a field of grass or a fallen tree, I’m interested in the power of the quotidian whereas they were interested in the power of the extraordinary.
Why have you gone away from people photography?
I came to find portraits a little disturbing, and dangerous – and not so much dangerous for me, but dangerous for the sitter. People who allow their portraits to be taken are so vulnerable to the photographer, I think. Everyone wants to please, everyone wants to make a good picture – and the good picture that comes out might be to the detriment of the sitter.
What does a photographer do? Do they take the picture that’s going to be the most powerful, or do they they take the picture that’s the most complimentary?
I guess painters face this too. It got to be a real dilemma for me.
Have you taken pictures you’ve regretted?
I think every photographer takes pictures they regret. Yeah, I can think of a few I regret, but I’d rather not! (Laughs.)
What’s different about southern landscapes – and you write about this some in the essays accompanying the photos?
If you had to nail down one thing, I think it’s the light, the quality of the southern light. There’s something soporically refulgent, and rich - the air has got this sort of rich, protein smell – it’s like this sweet ferment.
What makes you choose one landscape over another?
I look for something that has this irresistible melancholy – and a lot of times I’ll really feel it before I see it.
How so?
I don’t know. I guess it’s one of those intangibles of being an artist. The weird thing about my photography is I don’t feel it at 12 noon – I’m trying to think how to tell it to you now – I feel it in those gloaming, vestertine hours just before dark hour. Sometimes you just sorta have to set up the camera – you often don’t see the picture with your eyes. Sometimes you don’t see it until you put the black cloth over your head and you look at it in the 8”x10” frame.
I’m not a photographer, but I’ve gone under that black cloth on a camera once, and it was strange because I felt like I was shutting out the rest of the world.
That’s what I like about it. that’s what I like about the darkroom, too. I’m no very much of this world, I think.
Is that why you don’t leave Lexington?
I couldn’t live anyplace else, I don’t think. Now I live on the farm, and I don’t leave the farm – I’ve got this bizarre, reclusive personality.
Could you work anyplace else?
I once tried to take pictures in Maine – it was a disaster – all that clear, gimlet light, UGH. I worked in Mexico which was more successful, again because of the steamy light in the jungle.
And I photographed in Qatar. I’d never been to the desert before and I really liked it, but I only liked it when the sun was setting. Often a dust storm would blow up – so when the light shone though, parallel to the earth it almost began to look like southern air because of the turbidity.
Really, I’m always trying to take the same pictures.
You write in your introduction that for people living in the south, history is not only formative, but “impossibly present.” Why, and when is it you feel history is present around you?
Well, after all, I live in Lexington! You can’t go a mile down the road without seeing a little historical marker. I think the South, because of the Civil War of course, and because of its history of defeat and the terrible wounds from the racial struggle, unquestionably has a unique quality that is almost palpable. And I think that Southern artists have peculiarities unique as well: they certainly have an obsession with place. But, as well, they have an obsession with family, death, the past – and they’re uniquely susceptible to myth and mystery. They have a willingness to experiment with doses of romanticism that would be fatal to other, non-Southern artists.
The final section of the book, “Last Measure,” is a collection of images of Virginia Civil War battlefields. Did you actually camp out on the battlefields?
Well, where you’re allowed to. I didn’t have a problem with it.
Did you have a sense that they’re haunted?
I know people do, but I didn’t. It almost becomes the artist’s Proustian job to provide the memory. The earth – its job is to efface and remove and rejuvenate.
But, still, there were a few moments when I did. And the pictures seem to have it in them – and that’s what’s interesting to me. The pictures definitely look like they have spirits in them.
Do you dream about these places?
I’m not so good at remembering my dreams. I have dreams about feelings – I can conjure up the feeling of a photography, and probably do in my dreams, but not the particular place.
Have your reasons for being a photographer changed over the years?
It used to be that I’d just take a picture to see what the picture would look like. I’ve never really said this or put this to words. The pictures of the children – I would take them because they were beautiful, or they were standing in a beautiful place or doing something interesting. And then people overlaid them with meaning, and many a master’s thesis has been written about the symbolism behind the work and the meanings hidden in it. I read what they write and roll my eyes. Why can’t they just look at them as pictures of children in a beautiful place doing children-y kinds of things??
But the landscapes are of special places that have undergone very specific and unique events. I seem to be doing work now that has a theme, that has a raison d’etre or a little element of didacticism to it.
So you’re sort of overlaying your own meanings.
Yes!
Then do people understand your work more now, or less?
Certainly most people go what I was doing with “What Remains” and I think the same will prove true with “Deep South.” The writing should help a little just in case.
I think this new book will not be thought of as just a book of pretty pictures down south. Bourne within the images are resonances of the Civil War, of the fact that the whole Mississippi delta was literally carved out of jungle by African-Americans, and of the achingly beautiful, almost primordial element that still remains in the South.
You can’t forget that heritage.