Sally Mann: Proud Flesh - Photos Exhibition at Gagosian Gallery

GAGOSIAN GALLERY exhibits PROUD FLESH, a series of NEW PHOTOS by SALLY MANN

© 2009 - Sally Mann – Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

Children, landscape, lovers—these iconic subjects are as common to the photographic lexicon as light itself. But Sally Mann's take on them, rendered through processes both traditional and esoteric, is anything but common. From the outset of her career she has consistently challenged the viewer, rendering everyday experiences at once sublime and deeply disquieting.

In previous projects, Sally Mann has explored the relationships between parent and child, brother and sister, human and nature, site and history. Her latest photographic study of her husband Larry Mann, taken over six years, has resulted in a series of candid nude studies of a mature male body that neither objectifies nor celebrates the focus of its gaze. Rather it suggests a profoundly trusting relationship between woman and man, artist and model that has produced a full range of impressions – erotic, brutally frank, disarmingly tender, and more.

Sally Mann's technical methods and process further emphasize the emotional and temporal aspects of these fragile life studies. She uses a 19th-century process, the collodion wet-plate process, discovered in 1851. The images are contact prints made from wet-plate collodion negatives, produced by coating a sheet of glass with ether-based collodion and submerging it in silver nitrate before exposure. Sally Mann exploits the surface aberrations that can result from the unpredictability of the process to produce painterly photographs marked by stark contrasts of light and dark, with areas that resemble scar tissue. In works such as Hephaestus and Ponder Heart, the scratches and marks incurred in the production process become inseparable from the physical reality of Larry's body.

The photographer SALLY MANN was born in Lexington, VA in 1951. She has received numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of major museums and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and The Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C.

SALLY MANN

PROUD FLESH, PHOTOGRAPHS EXHIBITION

September 15 - December 23, 2009

GAGOSIAN GALLERY
980 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10075
Hours: Tue-Sat 10-6

A fully illustrated CATALOGUE of Proud Flesh photographs' series has been published in collaboration with Aperture including a text by the award-winning poet and author C.D. Wright. Among his many previous works, he has written the text of One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, published in 2003, with photographer Deborah Luster.

 

© 2009, Sally Mann/Aperture Foundation/Gogasian Gallery

SALLY MANN, Proud Flesh

Text by C. D. WRIGHT

Publishers: Aperture Foundation / Gagosian Gallery, October 2009

Clothbound 12" x 14" (30.5 x 36.2 cm) - 61 pages

33 tritone images

ISBN: 978-59711-135-5 - $75.00

Sally Mann’s books include At Twelve (Aperture, 1988), Immediate Family (Aperture, 1992), What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005). A feature film about her work, What Remains, debuted to critical acclaim in 2005.

Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence - Photo Exhibition at the ArtIC - Art Institute of Chicago

Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence 

Art Institute of Chicago

December 8, 2007 - February 24, 2008

Lauren Greenfield. Alli, Annie, Hannah, and Berit, All 13, before the First Big Party of the Seventh Grade, Edina, Minnesota, 1998. Restricted gift of Anstiss and Ronald Krueck in honor of RenŽe Harrison Drake, with love and admiration. © Lauren Greenfield/VII (from Girl Culture/Chronicle Books).

The Art Institute of Chicago’s photography exhibition will showcase a collection of perceptive, subtle images focusing on the subject of female adolescence. Girls on the Verge: Portraits of Adolescence — on view in Gallery 1 — features more than 40 photographs and one video by 11 contemporary artists, ranging from documentary pieces examining peer groups and body image to posed individual portraits. These pictures reveal the complexity, power, and common humanity of the transitional moments between girlhood and womanhood. Adolescent girls find themselves on the cusp between child and adult. It is a time of physical and emotional changes, of yearning for freedom while secretly cherishing constraints, of finding the pleasures as well as the terrors of one’s own appeal to the world. Increasingly, the dividing line between innocence and adulthood seems more and more blurred. Not surprisingly, then, this simultaneously beautiful and awkward stage has provided photographers with a wealth of material. In recent years, many contemporary photographers have explored female adolescence with empathetic images, featured in this exhibition, that evoke universal experience. Girls on the Verge includes works by a wide spectrum of photographers, all of whom bring their own perspective to the topic. Artists Tina Barney and Sally Mann, for example, looking at their own families and communities, have helped to pave the way for younger photographers. Although they approach their work from different vantage points, both Melissa Ann Pinney and Lauren Greenfield aim their cameras at “girl culture”; Pinney focuses on her daughter, while Greenfield compiles records of girls and women from all walks of life. Mark Steinmetz and Judith Joy Ross have produced restrained yet poignant black-and-white images of adolescents. In her portraits of teens on the beach and her video of a lip-synching young girl, Rineke Dijkstra presents her subjects as simultaneously confident and vulnerable, while Hellen van Meene directs adolescent girls into contrived poses that highlight the clumsy grace of their changing bodies. Finally, Lalla Essaydi, Céline van Balen, and Katherine Turczan photograph young women from non-Western cultures, who are somewhat removed from the overt sexuality and consumerism of the modern West. Girls on the Verge, featuring works from the Art Institute’s permanent collection and includes recent new acquisitions, is a provocative view of the universal experience of adolescence. 

 Photographer Lauren Greenfield will provide an insight into her works included in Girls on the Verge on Thursday, January 31, 2008, at 6:00 p.m., in Fullerton Hall. 

About Art Institute of Chicago

Sally Mann: What Remains - Exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington

Sally Mann: What Remains 

Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington 

June 12 - September 6, 2004 

Drawing upon her personal experiences as inspiration, Sally Mann creates a haunting series of photographs that speaks about the one subject that affects us all, the loss of life. Dark, beautiful and revelatory, What Remains, a five-part meditation on mortality, explores the ineffable divide between body and soul, life and death, spirit and earth. Never one to shy away from challenging subject matter, Sally Mann asks us to contemplate the beauty and efficiency with which nature assimilates the body once life has ended. The exhibition is accompanied by a book published by Bulfinch Press.

“Death is powerful,” says Sally Mann. “It’s perhaps best approached as a springboard to appreciate life more fully. That’s why this show ends with pictures of living people, pictures of my children. This whole body of work is a process of thanksgiving.”

Organized in five sections, Sally Mann: What Remains features more than 90 photographs. Matter Lent depicts the decomposition of Mann’s beloved pet greyhound, Eva. Here, she uses the wet-collodion process, a practice in nineteenth-century photography, to create images that are simultaneously painterly, illusionistic, weathered and photographic. Untitled, perhaps the most visually shocking section in the exhibition, is made up of images of human bodies going through the natural process of decomposition at a forensic study site. In this series, Mann does not shield the viewer from the reality of bodily decay.

 “There’s a moment where you look at those bodies and say, ‘that was a human being.’ That was someone who was loved, cherished, caressed,” says Sally Mann. “That’s a very tough one for me, the whole question of when a human becomes remains. That question came up over and over again while I was doing this work.”

The middle section of this exhibition features two series of landscape images: December 8, 2000 focuses on the site where an armed fugitive committed suicide on Sally Mann’s bucolic property in Virginia’s rural Shenandoah Valley. She witnessed life meeting death at her doorstep and this transitional incident served as the raw inspiration from which her photographic project unfolded. The Antietam series of landscape photographs, made at the Antietam battlefield in Sharpsburg, Maryland, go far beyond simple documentation of this rural Civil War location where 23,000 men were killed, wounded or declared missing on a single day in September 1862. These large scale images invite the viewer to contemplate the role of photography in documenting history, time passing and death’s sanctification of the eternal soil. Sally Mann concludes the project with What Remains, thirty-six extreme close-up portraits of her three children’s faces seen floating in an inky black atmosphere. While the subjects of these loving photographs appear in stark contrast to the ghostly images of death in her other series, the viewer cannot help but recall the other images when looking into the faces of the children. In this context, her children are “what remains.”

“This project is an epic visual poem – a philosophical rumination on mortality, one subject that no one can really explain. What happens to life when it ends? What remains that we do not see? Who could better explore this essentially unknowable topic than an artist with Sally Mann’s questioning gaze,” comments Philip Brookman, Corcoran Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts and curator of the exhibition. “For Sally, such an examination of the moment when the present becomes past should be accomplished by using photographic processes of another era as well.”

WET-COLLODION PROCESS

Introduced in 1851, the wet-collodion process is a method of making photographic negatives using a glass plate coated with chemicals. The plate is sensitized in a silver nitrate solution and exposed to light while still wet and sticky, which gives the photographer about 5 minutes to make the exposure. 

ABOUT SALLY MANN

Sally Mann was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1951. She received a BA from Hollins College in 1974 and an MA in writing from the same school in 1975. Mann has won numerous awards, including three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent collections of major museums worldwide, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Sally Mann’s photographs have been featured in several Corcoran exhibitions: In Response to Place: Photographs from The Nature Conservancy’s Last Great Places (2001), Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry (1996) and Sally Mann: The Lewis Law Portfolio (1977), Sally Mann’s first one-person exhibition. Her past publications include Second Sight, At Twelve, Immediate Family and Still Time. A documentary film about Sally Mann’s family pictures was nominated for an Academy Award in 1993. A feature-length follow-up spanning her career is in development and will air on HBO and the BBC. Time magazine named Sally Mann as America’s best photographer in 2001. She lives in Virginia with her family and seven rescued greyhounds.

CATALOGUE

Bulfinch Press has published a 132 page book with 85 tritone photographs and one four-color photograph that accompanies the exhibition Sally Mann: What Remains - www.bulfinchpress.com.

Sally Mann: What Remains is organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Following the presentation at the Corcoran, Sally Mann: What Remains will begin a national tour.

CORCORAN GALLERY OF ART

New York Avenue and 17th Street, NW, Washington, DC

www.corcoran.org

Inside-Out Portrait Photographs at the Whitney Museum

Inside-Out: Portrait Photographs from the Permanent Collection 

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

February 7 - May 23, 2004

Portraiture is the subject of the exhibition Inside-Out: Portrait Photographs from the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. All recently acquired by the Whitney, these photographs explore the intricate dynamics involved in the relationship between subject and artist, examining issues such as vanity, comfort, and intimacy. The works, by such artists as Chuck Close, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Nicholas Nixon, Irving Penn, and Stephen Shore, assert photography’s capacity both to register a subject’s physical characteristics and to suggest the complexity within the subject’s emotional and psychological interior life.

Several artists, including Dawoud Bey, Chan Chao, and Melissa Pinney photograph unknown subjects within their environments. By contrast, Chuck Close, Nan Goldin, and Nicholas Nixon portray friends, family, or people with whom they have cultivated a relationship. More formal portraits describe an activity or commemorate an occasion, as in Paul Shambroom’s image of city council members at work, or in Irving Penn’s portrait of five esteemed American artists – Chuck Close, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, and Robert Rauschenberg.

“When a subject and a photographer come together and agree that a likeness will be made, a complex dynamic is set in motion,” said Sylvia Wolf, the Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney. “In the most compelling portraits there is often a collision of wills, an exposure of vulnerability, a seduction, or surrender. The public face that the sitter wants to show the world is tempered by something deeper. Multiple layers of experience are brought to the surface and the inside is turned out for us to see.”

Whitney Museum of American Art [Click the link for more information]