Podcast #68: Sally Mann on Ethical Photography and Stories

By Tracy O'Neill, Social Media Curator
July 7, 2015

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Photographer Sally Mann's books include Immediate Family, What Remains, and Proud Flesh. Primarily working in black and white portraiture, Mann imbues her work with luminosity and a sensual macabre. Her memoir Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs is newly published, and this week on the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Sally Mann discussing ethical photography and stories.

Sally Mann photograph of girl jumping in clouds

Born in Virginia, Mann actually was introduced to one of her great influences, Faulkner, while attending school in the northeast:

"Literature was really important to me. I went to a school called Putney up in Vermont, and I was just an ignorant Appalachian cracker when I got there. I mean, I was wearing my boyfriend's football jacket, his football sweater. I just was hopeless. And I get there, and I had what I call an awakening, and a lot of it was due to someone handing me well it was either The Sound and Fury or The Light in August. And that's where it all started with me. It all started with Faulkner."

When asked how she began the work of narrating her life, Mann described it as a process of collection and arrangement, almost like sourcing and threading beads for a necklace:

"How did I start? I started basically by stringing this whole concatenation of stories together that I told for years. You know when you go to a dinner party you always have like one or two stories you always tell? Well I realized that those dozen, half dozen stories that I told for years were sort of turning into my life. When you string them all together you really have something."

Mann's memoir is as much a work of text as it is a work of images. Over a career spanning more than three decades, Mann has developed perspective on the relationship between photographer and subject, which she shared at Books at Noon:

"Portraiture: that's where you really need the splinter of ice because it's so so easy to take advantage of a photographic subject, and I think that it's a deeply ethically complex situation when you're photographing someone because you as the photographer hold all the cards. You always do. And your subject is completely vulnerable to you, and without that little sliver of ice, you can't take the tough pictures. In my case, I take the tough pictures... a series of pictures I did with [husband] Larry. We were exploring the nature of his physical disability as a result of the disease, and those pictures were tough to take. He's a much braver man than I am a photographer, and he was perfectly willing to have me take the pictures, but I had to say to myself, 'Okay, I'm going to take the pictures. It's painful for both of us, but I'm going to take the pictures.'"