Sally Mann’s photographs of the Southern landscape are romantic, almost gothic.
Mann, who has spent most of her life in and around Lexington, Virginia, has always focused on the American South. Although most well known for the success and controversy surrounding her 1992 collection “Immediate Family,” much of her work since then has centered on the Southern landscape.
“Mother Land” (1992-96) and “Deep South” (1998) depict Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi in hazy black-and-white images. Most of these photos were taken using antique deteriorating lenses and the collodion wet-plate technique, a 19th-century process producing much of the blurring, fading and manipulations that distort the images.
Vignette erodes the corners of pictures, absorbing the dark shapes of trees and vines into a single black mass; vines and fallen branches disappear into a fog as if floating; scars and flaws sometimes cut through the image like burns.
These distortions feel like projections of imagination — places where the illusion of authoritative reality that a photo provides is broken.
“Southerners live at the nexus between myth and reality,” Mann wrote in the “Mother Land” exhibition catalog, “… Memory is most often an act of will.”
In Mann’s images of the Southern landscape, myth and reality overlap. The imagined landscape superimposes the real landscape.
In 2000, an escaped convict shot himself in the woods of Mann’s farm and she photographed the site where he died. As her work shifted, she began to question how bodies change the land that they are held in — and in turn, I think, how land holds and remembers bodies.
“Sally Mann’s photographs of the Southern landscape are romantic, almost gothic.”
She began photographing former Civil War battlegrounds.
Living only 50 miles from Jerry Falwell’s former headquarters, a two-hour drive from a third of Civil War battlefields and in a town whose residents included Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Mann is acutely aware of the Southern culture that bleeds into her work, including its obsession with loss and memory.
“Flannery O’Connor said the South is Christ-haunted, but I think it’s death-haunted,” Mann wrote in the “Deep South” exhibition text.
Mann is photographing what haunts these sites — or whatever is left of them, that is. These images, distorted with the collodion wet-plate technique similar to her other landscapes, are haunted. At times, the line of a horizon is barely visible between a dark sky and dark ground; ripples texture hills and sky like doomsday clouds. Her photos of Sharpsburg, where the 1862 Battle of Antietam that left 23,000 dead took place, look nearly apocalyptic, with a black sun and clouds eroding the image.
Mann, in these distortions, is showing us what we can’t see. Ghosts, maybe. She is recording not just the land itself but the memory and imagination that it holds. In their soft, manufactured, black-and-white fog, the photos seem to speak to both the romance and violence that hangs in the air of these landscapes and so in the South’s memory of itself post-Civil War.
In her 2015 memoir “Hold Still,” Mann wrote about the treachery of memory and its “malignant twin,” the treachery of photography.
“Once photographed, whatever you had ‘really seen’ would never be seen by the eye of memory again,” Mann wrote. “It would be cut … from the fat life of time.”
Mann documents not only the decay of a place — of a landscape that exists half in memory — but the decay inherent in photography as a medium.
Photography is an attempt to remember something — we want to hold a moment still in time. I do, at least. Photos always feel kind of melancholy to me, as if filled with a longing for what they have frozen. Mann’s images just make that melancholy more visible. But they also make clear the unreliability of photography and memory, the vulnerability of both to distortion.
More than anything, Mann’s images ask how we remember ourselves; how both landscape and photography hold memory and how both ultimately fall flat.
Nadia Hsu PO ’27 is from Austin, Texas. She is chalant.
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