From Book News, Inc.
Mann's work is quite controversial in circles where nudity and innocence do not overlap. She offers 65 black-and-white photographs of her children doing children's things in and around their rural Virginia home. An exhibition of the collection began a US tour in October 1992. Includes an afterword by writer Reynolds Price. No scholarly paraphernalia. 11.25" deep. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Review
"[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


Review
"[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


Review
"[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


Book Description
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.


About the Author
Sally Mann has exhibited and taught nationally. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Chrysler Museum, the Corcoran Gallery, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and other major collections around the country. She has received grants from the NEA, the NEH, the Friends of Photography, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Lexington, Virginia, with her husband and three children, whom she continues to photograph as part of an ongoing project. All of the photographs in Immediate Family were taken with an 8-by-10-inch view camera.

Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina, in 1933. His 1962 novel A Long and Happy Life received the William Faulker Award for a notable first novel, and has never been out of print. He has published numerous other books, including Kate Vaiden, for which he received the National Books Critics Circle Award. He has also published volumes of short stories, poems, plays, essays, a memoir, and he has written for the screen and for television. He is a member of the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke University.

ANNOTATION

Terror, self-discovery, doubt, vulnerability, pain, and joy all clash and converge in Mann's powerful photographs. Sally Mann's widely acclaimed Immediate Family, which explores childhood with unparalleled emotional depth, is now available in paperback for the first time.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Immediate Family. Photographs by Sally Mann; Afterword by Reynolds Price. In these masterful photographs of Mann's three children, the truths this exceptional artist reveals transcher specific family and border on universal epic myth. 65 blackandwhite duotone photographs, 11 X 9 1/2, 78 pages. paperback;

"Mann's subjects are her small children ( a boy, a girl, and a new baby), often shot when they're sick or hurt or just naked. Nosebleeds, cuts, hives, chicken poX, swollen eyes, vomitingthe usual trials of childhoodcan be alarmingly beautiful, thrillingly sensual moments in Mann's portrait album. Her ambivalence about motherhoodher delight and despairpushes Mann to delve deeper into the steaming mess of family life than most of us are willing to go. What she comes up with is astonishing."

Vince Aletti, The Village Voice

"The photographs are beautiful and strange, like a dream of childhood in the summer. They are not your usual pictures of the children to sto the grandparents; they are pictures to sto the Museum of Modern Art."

Janet Malcolm, The New York Review of Books

"Immediate Family, which was published in 1990, must be counted as one of the great photograph books of our time. It is a singularly powerful evocation of childhood from within and without, tender and vertiginous and scary, employing a large photographic vocabulary to render precise ambiguities. Mann [constructs] a style that is much more farranging than the average contemporary photographer would permit him or herself, and yet identifiable and cohesive."

Luc Sante, The New Republic

FROM THE CRITICS

BookList - Gretchen Garner

Mann's "At Twelve" (Aperture, 1988) depicted girls at the threshold of sexual maturity. Her interest in sexualized childhood continues in these photographs of her own three youngsters. Often she shows them naked, perhaps not always willingly (one picture is "The Last Time Emmett Modeled Nude"), and sometimes in poses that might make not just feminists but nearly anyone shudder: e.g., "Hayhook," in which daughter Jessie hangs naked from a lethal-looking hook like so much dead meat. A shot of her son called "Popsicle Drips" crops his torso a la Edward Weston's famous picture of his son Neil but emphasizes the boy's penis, surrounded by said drips. The focus upon sex competes with the evocation of death in shots of bleeding children and dead animals and of sleeping postures that recall nineteenth-century postmortem portraits. The pictures do share a luscious, romantic quality, and Mann has become a curators' favorite despite (or because of) her clear references to many other photographers, especially Emmett Gowin. In an accompanying essay, Reynolds Price opines of Mann's children that he "can't well imagine that they'll regret any moment their mother has seen or arranged." Some viewers, though, may suspect they'll not only regret but resent their mother's employing them for such provocative, disturbing images.

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