Photographer Sally Mann is a collector: not of possessions, like her husband Larry, who saves everything from dead birds to busted toasters in the attic of their home in rural Virginia, but of sentences, images and moments.
“I do all these little weird things,” Ms. Mann said in a recent interview with the Gazette. “I travel with New Yorkers [the magazine] and when something is really good, I tear out the bit of the New Yorker and I bring it home, and I type it in my quotes file.” So far, the file has 244 entries.
A few pictures in her most recent book, Art Work: On the Creative Life, provide glimpses into the magpie-like way she collects images, and how she lives in and amongst them. One picture from years ago shows a wall of thumbtacked reference images, some her own test prints, some pages torn from books — with her son doing his homework nearby.
Ms. Mann, who is speaking about her book on July 30 at the Performing Arts Center in Oak Bluffs as part of the Martha’s Vineyard Author Series, also collects moments in the way that photographers do.
“I am far from spiritual,” she writes toward the end of Art Work, “but I have experienced, convincingly, the ineffable magic by which obsession, frustration, repetition, and serendipity miraculously transfigure that thin, Nabokovian slice of time, that tenth of a second, into something eternal.”
In her book, she describes how these qualities have served her since she was a cocky teenager, confident that her love of photography was all she needed to make a life for herself, into her years as a young mother.
Obsession and commitment were also helpful as she weathered the controversy that came as a result of her Immediate Family series in the early 1990s, which depicts, in her trademark black and white large-format images, her children in and around their home, as they were: moody, playful and sometimes nude.
She’s famous for the pictures in this series — one shows a daughter holding a candy cigarette, another is of a child whose bloody nose has dripped down his chin, a third depicts her son standing in a river with his hands forming ripples on the water’s surface. But her career has been long and other bodies of work have focused on different subject matter, such as her beloved rural Southern landscape. The region’s complex history, and the other artists who have been entranced by it before her, are sources of inspiration.
Ms. Mann also has drawn inspiration for her work from literature.
“Early on, it was Faulkner and all that Gothic Romanticism,” she said.
Walt Whitman inspired her Battlefields series, pictures of American landscapes nearly obscured by darkness and swirling effects created by the photographic process itself. Nabokov’s Lolita informed At Twelve, she said, referring to her series of portraits of girls at the fulcrum of childhood and young adulthood.
Her own writing is warm, generous and funny. Reading Art Work feels like spending time with a friend who gets the whole dinner table laughing with great stories while refilling the wine glasses.
The book contains plenty of delightful adventures and misadventures such as the time she and Larry rented their trailer to a couple who proceeded to board up the windows, fill the yard with trash and refuse to leave, or the time she was invited to Qatar by the Emir to take his portrait in the desert.
But it’s also a guidebook. In many places, Ms. Mann speaks directly to the readers who are themselves young artists and may benefit from the experiences she’s collected over the years.
“When you get old, you start wanting to impart all this hard-earned wisdom to young people,” she said. “I get asked all the time, ‘How do you make your pictures? How do you decide what you’re going to do? How do you know when it’s time to stop? What advice do you have for young people?’ I thought, well, I’ll just write this [expletive] down.”
Readers will be grateful she did. In some sections, she humbly breaks down her process, showing the B-side images that typically only see the red light of the darkroom floor. She holds firm to her claim that talent is not necessary and maybe doesn’t even exist at all. And she shows how the life of an artist, at least the life of one particular artist, often isn’t glamorous.
“The measure of artistic success is not money, it is time,” she writes. “And you must regulate it like the metronymic steps of the most unflappable Beefeater on parade. Let people make fun of my Day-Timer, clutched to my breast like a rosary.”
Later, she paraphrases Flaubert, writing “you should be regular and orderly in your life, so you can write like an avenging angel.”
Ms. Mann’s life hasn’t always been orderly or regular, but she has always found a way to return to the camera, lifting the dark cloth and peering through the ground glass underneath.
Often, what she’s training her lens on is the same type of pastoral scenes that can be found on Martha’s Vineyard. One picture in Art Work of mist settled around some trees could have been taken in the woods up-Island on a cool summer morning. She may bring her small digital Leica camera to the Vineyard when she visits but mostly intends to rest for a bit before returning to her obsessions.
“I’m not doing anything,” she said of her plans for the trip. “That’s what I’m looking forward to doing.”
Sally Mann will be at the Performing Arts Center on July 30 as part of the Martha's Vineyard Author Series. The event begins at 7 p.m., and she will be in conversation with Jill Medvedow, director emerita of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston.
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